Counted cross stitch

After I got my first embroidery sewing machine back in about 1990, I stopped doing a lot of hand embroidery. Because when I could embroider on the sewing machine projects got done so much faster. As the arthritis got worse in my hands, there was also another reason why I didn't like embroidering by hand -- it hurt! However, lately, I've realized that just sitting on the couch in the evenings propping your feet up, its kind of hard to hold an embroidery machine in your lap and certainly not relaxing. Recently in my eBay store, I've gotten in a lot of counted cross stitch kits and that got me excited about doing counted cross stitch again. So I dug into my sewing room and found an old pattern of a butterfly sampler that looked promising and got some floss and some Aida cloth together and decided I was going to try to at least do a little bit of counted cross stitch in the evenings. Well, my first mistake was picking a pattern that was rated skilled, all though in years past, I would have considered myself skilled I haven't done any major projects for close to 10 years. So I'm out of practice. The next mistake was trying to use Aida cloth for a pattern that used a lot of quarter and half stitches. After sewing a bit on the sampler, I realized the fabric was all wrong and I was getting very frustrated. Back into my sewing room, I went and found more suitable cross stitch fabric and restarted the entire project. The going is much faster now and I'm making progress.

Once I started doing this I realized how much I'd missed doing counted cross stitch in the evenings while watching TV. I like to multi-task, and since most TV is not enough to occupy my mind and hands I now have something to do. So yet again, I now have several projects to work on both in the living room and in my sewing room. A quilt for me, it has a patchwork center and a border that I'm appliquéing roses on with my embroidery machine. And another Project Linus quilt that I'm machine quilting. And now I have my butterfly sampler that I'll be working on I'm sure for the next year or two.

As I'm getting used to having arthritis, I'm finding more and more I need to occupy my mind and hands as much as possible and have many different kinds of projects to work on depending on my physical ability at the moment. Although there are many things that I can't do, it helps to have small projects, different books to read, etc. to keep myself occupied with so that I don't get bored and depressed.