First post!

I still remember the first cross-stitch that I ever made. I was probably about eight years old when my elementary school class was learning about "life on the American frontier," and one of our assignments was to do a cross-stitch of our initials. An experienced crafter and cross-stitcher, my mom helped me lay out my design, choose my floss colors, and stitch the piece together.

I've made countless cross-stitch projects since then, and for most of them, I based my work on commercially available patterns and design books. But as my tastes have changed over the years, I moved away from cross-stitch because most of the books and patterns had a fussy or cutesy style that didn’t speak to me anymore.

But then I started experimenting with making my own project designs, and I realized that this richly historical, old-school stitching technique lends itself perfectly to the clean, simple, modern designs that I like to work on. I have also found that with four hours of train commuting to do each day, I have all the time that I need to dream up new project ideas and even get a good deal stitched as well. Now to find the time to photograph and blog about it all...