Completed Project: My Grandmother's Cross-Stitch

 It’s done.

Completed.

Several years of work, and a meaningful group project.

 But this is how it started.

 

First things first. You can read the story of how I started this project – and this blog! – in this post here. Click the link; I’ll wait.

Got it? Good.

This was obviously a few years ago, and much longer than I thought it would take for me to finish this particular project. Pandemics and the chaos they cause tend to throw a few spanners in the works, don’t they? We’ve all had more time for certain things – panic, stress, emergency homeschooling, baking, cooking, sitting at home -  and less time for other things, like sitting around chatting with friends, going places, being out of the house. And that’s where this project slowed down for me: it was my on-the-go project, something I could work on to keep my hands busy while still chatting with friends or family.

And there’s been so little going and chatting with anyone the past two years.

Finally, a few months ago, I said enough of this project sitting around not getting worked on, and I picked it up again.

It wasn’t always easy. Sometimes I didn’t really feel like working on it, but that’s what commitment is, isn’t it? Forging on ahead even when you’re not all that enthusiastic, because there’s a job you vowed to finish, and it won’t get finished unless you put in the work.

But mostly, it was good work. Calming. The rhythm of the needle, the colors spreading across the fabric, I found it soothing. This wasn’t the project I would have chosen – I prefer counted cross-stitch to stamped – but it was nice finishing the work of the woman from whom I inherited my love of crafting.

Sometimes it made me sad. My grandmother and I were close when I was young, but our relationship fractured when she and my grandfather accused me of, to make a long story short, being the problem in my mother and stepfather’s marriage. I was not; his abuse just started with me. My grandparents called me horrible names, at a time when I had already moved out of the house due to the abuse (I was eighteen). Several months later, I moved out of state; my mother’s husband’s terrible behavior continued for years, this time aimed at my mother. Occasionally it was bad enough for the police to get involved. (Yes, she’s still married to him. I have no idea why.)

My grandparents eventually understood that he was the problem, and they, too, questioned why my mother remained married to him, but no one ever apologized to me for the accusations and insults they hurled at me. And that hurt. Our relationship was never the same after that.

Her death was strange for me, and I was more worried about my mother, the youngest sibling, than anything else. And inheriting my grandmother’s cross-stitch material has been both healing and thought-provoking. With this and things like Swedish death cleaning making the news in past years, it’s got me thinking about at what point we stop accumulating new things and instead focus on what we have. It’s something that’s been in the back of my mind all this time, and while I’ve definitely added books to my stash…that’s really been about it. I have enough to work on.

And now I have one fewer project.

I present to you: my grandmother’s cross-stitch, completed.

 

It’s been a long journey, completing this thing, but I’m glad to have it checked off my list. There are a few more unfinished items in the box I inherited from my grandmother, some of which I’m not entirely sure what to do with, as there’s no pattern to go with those items. For now, though, I’m going to focus on completing a few of the other goals on my list for the year. Because what this project taught me, friends, is to complete your projects. Finish what you start, because you don’t want to leave too much unfinished when you cross that finish line.