Counted cross-stitching is an art for the home and the homemaker. It creates beauty through small ‘x’ stitches to create pictures. It blooms a quiet spirit in the homemaker, creating hours to sit, focus on small tasks, and relaxation to the mind.
The Pattern
For this three-year project, I started it on my honeymoon in June 2019. It got put off to the side throughout graduate classes and weeks teaching. It was put on the backburner while I cross-stitched a smaller one as a gift, different larger project for another gift, and another smaller one for myself.
This pattern incorporates my husband’s personality. I grew up with red tractors. He grew up with both, but loved his grandpa’s John Deere 4020. He loves to hunt deer. His favorite season is fall. And he grew up raising animals and helping on family farms. I grew up with the red barn with the gray roof on my family’s farm. In the picture, it merges where we came from within agriculture as well as showcases who we grew to be over our first three years of marriage.
We don’t have a red barn, let alone a barn. We do have a homesteading lifestyle.
We don’t have any John Deere tractors, but we have a mid-nineteenth-century International and 1990’s New Holland.
He expanded his deer hunting from rifle season to also early muzzleloader with the in-line and late muzzleloader with his flintlock. I have started hunting with him in both rifle and early muzzleloader.
Process
I start in the center with the cross-stitches. I pick one color, finish stitching one strand before moving onto another closer color. I do this until I worked my way the left lower side. This works on the fall leaves and the one tractor. Stitching the tractor can be redundant keeping to the same colors of black and John Deere green. The leaves on the other hand change colors frequently. I only was using a small amount of the one strand of thread before changing to a different thread.
The kit comes with thread holders that work great for changing colors and keeping threads organized. Nevertheless, it comes with the thread all together that needs sorted through, with a blank thread holder. It takes time at the very beginning. The thread holder after three years had so much wear and tear from regular usage, times being shoved into my stitching bag, and welp, my dog stealing it. Parts of it ripped and I needed to reorganize and move some of the thread around.
The cross-stitching essentially sat in my stitching bag for over a year. When I finished the other projects, I finally got this one back out to work on it again. I work from the center down to the bottom and off to the right bottom of the aida cloth. This focuses on the buck, a tractor, and the doe in the background.
Before some last touches in the bottom right, I work on the upper part of pattern. This includes the barn, tree line, and fencing.
I finally completed all the cross-stitches in November of 2022. Backstitching and making French knots took a few days with completing this counted cross-stitching project in December of 2022.
Reflections
If I was starting this kit again, I would work from the center, but instead of working in one direction alone, I would focus on going both left and right the same amount and going up and down the same amount. With this pattern, I started on the first tractor and just went from there.
There are a few spots that I messed up on. Some worse than others. If I would make the mistakes again in the fall leaves on the left side, I would leave the mistakes. Once it is finished, nobody would ever see the mistake of a light orange in the place of a dark yellow.
I did make a mistake on stitching the doe. Oops! Now I bet you are zooming in to take a look! It’s all good. The doe still has her shape, but it is just a little disfigured, compared to what it is suppose to be. I rarely take out stitches by seam ripping, but that’s one area I probably should have! 2
I also wish that I would have saved the picture of the whole project that is used to advertise the kit. At times, I didn’t quite understand what the actual pattern was expecting of me. I had to search my Amazon orders to find the picture of it again.
Overall even with the mistakes, I love the end result of the cross-stitching pattern. The time completing it was fun. Every stitch just leads to the end product that will add beauty to one’s home.
