I stitched this during the year of 1993. It was the year we were living in Adelaide, my eldest two were tiny, Craig was away a lot and I spent many evenings alone in the lounge room with this on my lap and a very strong lamp positioned to beam over my shoulder, concentrating on these tiny stitches. I can remember I set myself a goal of completing one letter each week, and managed to stick to this schedule successfully; I find I always work better to a deadline than to any other motivation…
I had a good friend over there doing one of these same cross-stitches for herself at the same time I was doing mine. I can still remember it took me over an hour to sort out the embroidery threads that came with the kit; to give you an idea the colours included brown, light brown, very light brown and very very light brown, dark brown, very dark brown and black/brown, and very light mushroom brown, dark tan, tan, light tan and very light tan. Not to mention grey brown, light grey brown, very light grey brown and very very light grey brown! Laugh! And that is just the browns! I’m not even going to start on the greens… I still have the thread cards on which I’ve carefully printed out all the colours and also copied the letters needing each one alongside.
It has a different native animal/bird/flower for each letter. I’ve included a couple of close-ups of some of my favourite letters; I always loved the colours of the Urchin and the Goanna, my husband favoured the Numbat and Tim like the Australian flag.
Gee, it’s been a long time since I did any cross-stitch, and I once enjoyed doing it but now I’m completely over it. Still I’m pretty happy I’ve got this concrete reminder of what was a very content time for me, when I had a very domesticated life at home with my kiddies.
