X Marks The Spot

As most of you know, I am an artist.  Or – I like to call myself one since that’s what I got a higher education for.  I’m also a writer of books.  YES! I said “books” because the second one is coming.  Hold your horses. I have to edit it.  I do it all myself, ya know.  

However, at 11:00PM every night I stop what I’m doing.  Dinner was cooked and consumed around 9:00PM and the dogs have been walked.  So now it’s my time.  Thanks to Tim, I have a great television in the studio upstairs. And thanks to a friend I haven’t seen in three years, I have a comfy leather chair in which to plant my ass. And that is where I sit and cross stitch.  You heard me – cross stitch.  The art that is normally known as a woman thing. 

My Father used to cross stitch.  Big ol’ burly man used to sit in his chair and pull the tiny needle through the holes to make pretty pictures.  I know.  Hard to believe my father made anything pretty.  Yet he did.  But it was my grandmother (who used to do needlepoint) is the one who taught me how to manipulate string, needle, and canvas when I was around 12 years old. I’ve been doing it ever since. 

The problem is that I can NEVER find any cross stitch patterns that I like or that are cool.  That is about to change.  I figured since I’m an artist – I can just turn my art into cross stitch.  And that’s what I’ve done.  We used to have a Bohica2k Store, but we had to shut that down for the time being.  We weren’t getting any money in to keep the store profitable.  So we’ll be selling our cross stitch kits on Amazon once I get a good five to ten kits up and running. 

In the meantime, I’ve finished “The Money Tree”.  It took three long years.  I stitched while binge watching television shows such as “Scandal”, “How To Get Away With Murder”, “Vikings”, “Arrested Development”, “Downton Abbey”, “The Crown”, “Transparent”, “Black Sails”, the list is long actually.  Three years of television.  It was a sad night when I finished this piece.  Tim is the one who put the last X in.  I made sure it was a purple one so he was happy, I was happy, the whole world was happy. 

I’m not exactly sure what we’re going to do with this piece now that it’s done.  I know I have to clean it in the tub since it’s way too big to clean in the kitchen sink.  Then iron it, and probably frame it.  After that – I’m not sure since I have absolutely run out of wall space to put anything else.  Tim and I joke that either we need to build new walls, or we just need to rent another apartment so I can put stuff up on THOSE walls.  We’ll see.  I’m thinking someone we both know and love will probably be the recipient of this piece.  Provided they have wall space to hang it. 

Okay, then.  It’s done!  These are the close up shots.  It’s just a little over 200k X’s.  If you’ve never cross stitched – it’s really easy.  Just time consuming. And you have to pay attention to what you’re doing in a teeny, tiny, space.   My toughest chore the entire time was keeping the stupid dog hair off of it.  I never knew my white dog was such a shedder.  She should be bald! I was constantly pulling white dog hairs off so they wouldn’t get into the thread.