The Beginning

I started crafting when I was very young. I don't remember learning anything, I just remember doing. The oldest projects I remember doing were the butterfly calendars. My grandmother would buy a butterfly calendar every year and have me do the work on it before she put it up on the wall. These were not ordinary flip calendars made of paper that showed beautiful pictures of butterflies. These calendars were made from special cloth with the calendar printed on the bottom. Printed outlines of butterflies consumed the top portion and drizzled down around the calendar itself. Little black dots covered the fabric in specific patterns. What I had to do was sew on specific colors of beads and sequins where the dots indicated. I spent weeks diligently sewing this project every year when I was very young. I'm not sure what age I began or ended for that matter. The calendars are no longer available to my knowledge. At least I haven't been able to find any. The calendars were my first projects and it wasn't too long after that that I began learning to cross stitch. My grandmother had great patience with me as she taught me to read the patterns and discern the different colors of thread and to complete stitches in such a way as to use the least amount of thread as possible. I learned quickly and excelled in creating perfect stitches, but it took me a long time to learn to conserve thread and to not get lost with patterns. I still have some projects where I obviously got off on the pattern and just decided to make my own pattern after that. I have a bear I made for Christmas that had two different colored feet and his sleeves are different lengths. I don't have any pictures of these projects or the projects themselves to show. They have long been lost to me and I think they have probably been thrown away at one time or another.