I’d never thought about what it would mean to finish someone else’s unfinished cross-stitch project, especially when that someone was my mom.
I have apparently entered my grandma hobby era.
And I am delighted to be here.
A few months after my mom died, I brought home a cross-stitch project she had started decades ago.
And when I say decades, I mean 1988-ish/1990-ish. I have done the math several times because it seems impossible that anything from 1990 could be 36 years old, but here we are.
It was a huge winter village scene. Houses. A church. Horses. Tiny people. Snow. Trees. A mill. Approximately nine million little stitches.
And unlike a lot of cross-stitch patterns where there is some blessed empty fabric providing breathing room, this one had not one open stitch in the entire pattern.
My mom had already done a ton of it.
She’d also clearly reached a point where she was like, Absolutely not.
The Project That Kept Moving With Her
For years, she’d pick it up and put it down.
But she never got rid of it.
I figured out that this unfinished little village had been packed into boxes and moved with her seven different times.
Seven houses.
More than three decades.
Somehow it kept making the cut.
After she died, it came home with me.
And then, in a fitting tribute to both of us, it lived in the back of my car from October until January.
IFYKYK.
I wasn’t necessarily planning to finish it. I just knew I wasn’t ready to decide what to do with it.
Then I had a tarot card reading in January.
During the reading, I was told I needed some kind of passively active hobby.
Something that would keep my hands busy and let my brain settle down.
“Like sewing or something.”
Well.
Fine.
Message received.
I went home, pulled Mom’s cross-stitch out of my car, cleaned it up and started stitching.
Turns Out, I Love Cross-Stitching
I gave myself a goal: finish it and have it framed by Christmas.
I thought it might take me most of the year.
Instead, I became completely obsessed.
I stitched through the winter, usually curled up under a heated blanket at Storybook Hill.
And there was something especially lovely about working on her project in my new house.
A house she would have loved.
I didn’t need to produce anything.
I wasn’t building a business.
I wasn’t writing an article.
I wasn’t optimizing something, solving something, researching something or trying to figure out what came next.
I just had to find the right little square and put a stitch in it.
Then another.
And another.
There’s something wonderfully meditative about that.
My hands had a job.
My brain could wander.
And slowly, this village she’d started all those years ago began filling in.
Somewhere Around Hour 200…
I’m not completely sure how long it took.
My best guess is more than 200 hours.
Which sounds absolutely unhinged when I say it out loud.
But it never really felt like 200 hours.
It felt like winter.
A heated blanket.
A needle and thread.
Quiet nights at home.
And this strange little connection between something my mom started in one season of her life and something I finished in a completely different season of mine.
She couldn’t have known where this thing would eventually end up.
She couldn’t have known I’d be sitting in a house on a hill decades later, finishing the tiny trees and snowbanks she’d started.
And I certainly couldn’t have known when I brought it home that I’d end up loving the process so much.
And Now It’s Finished
Thirty-six years.
Eight moves.
Two generations.
And God only knows how many stitches.
It’s finally done.
Dale is going to make a frame for it, which somehow makes the whole thing even better.
But I don’t want to keep it just for myself.
We’re going to rotate it between my siblings, our stepdad and me every Christmas.
It’ll spend the holidays in a different house each year.
Which feels exactly right for something that spent 36 years moving around with Mom.
It gets to keep moving.
Only now, it’s finished.
And instead of being tucked away in a box waiting for someday, it’ll hang on someone’s wall every Christmas as a little piece of her.
I thought I was finishing my mom’s cross-stitch.
Turns out, she may have left me a hobby.
Anyway. Winter project complete.
Bring on garden season. 🌱
Apparently I’ve entered my grandma hobby era. You can find the projects, supplies, books, and other things currently keeping my hands busy in Grandma Hobbies →
