Out of nowhere, the cross stitch bug recently bit me. I used to cross stitch many years ago, and I was pretty into it. I made all kinds of wall hangings for the house, stuff for Christmas, and lots of gifts. Then I just kind of lost interest. Some of it was due to the fact that you can only stitch so many wall hangings and have no space for them all. At least with making jewelry or crochet or knitting you end up with something you can wear it afterwards.

But it is summer and I figured what the heck. Let the bug bite. I looked through Etsy.com and Ebay and other places on-line for a cross stitch kit that would sooth my itch to stitch and finally found one at 1-2-3 Stitch.com. I ended up discovering a line of kits called Dolly Mamas that are all hilarious. It was hard to just pick one, but of course, if I’m successful with this one, I can move on to some of the others. I ended up getting one called “Important Utensil.”

Her sign says “The most important utensil is a corkscrew!” I picked this one because it didn’t look to difficult, and I could either keep it for myself or give it as a gift. I received the kit pretty quickly, and so far so good. Though, I did have to watch a few Youtube cross stitch videos to help me get started again. I had forgotten things like you need to find the center and start there. The instructions aren’t that bad that come with the kit, but they do assume a little knowledge about the basics already.

Here you can see my first few stitches, which start with her apron. As I work the stitches, I started to highlight the ones finished in blue on the pattern. Of course, if I were to reuse the pattern I would have wanted to make a copy of it, but I don’t see me making this over and over again.

In hindsight, since my cross stitch skills are pretty rusty, I might have selected a kit that is not necessarily a beginner level. There are French knots required in a number of spots (eek!), but there is no reason for me to rush. I have done this sort of thing before. I just have to allow time for my fingers to remember. I really do hope this turns out well because there are a lot of other kits in this series that I’d love to do. It took me forever to decide on just this one!