Geeky crafting. We’ve all seen it and thought to ourselves, I wish I could do that. I have never been creative or artsy, but scrolling through Pinterest and even Imgur has inundated me with images of doable crafts that would express my geeky nature. But what do I do and where do I start? The world of crafting is vast and the possibilities are endless; so I decided to start with what I know, cross-stitching.
My mother is and has always been a crafty lady. She stitches, crochets, knits, scrapbooks, you name it. During my childhood, she took great pain to teach me and my sister the basics of stitching, hoping to eventually lead us up to the big leagues. Unfortunately for her, both my sister and I found it too boring and never bothered to pick it up. Decades later (and I mean decades), some rough personal issues came around and I started looking for a distraction. I had recently seen some geeky cross-stitch come up on Imgur and decided then and there that it was going to be my “new thing.” My mother already had all the necessary materials available, partially for her own use and partially because she still had this dream of bestowing it upon her daughters. Well this is her lucky day! I was finally giving in; all I had to do was choose my first project.
Normally I can be quite ambitious when I’m starting something new: why should I half-ass it? I started googling all sorts of patterns, looking on Etsy, using Pinterest. I found increasingly difficult patterns that I wanted to make for all the important geeks in my life (of which there are many). Of course, this doesn’t always work out in my favour and I end up getting frustrated. So for quite possibly the first time in my life, I tell myself to tone it down and choose something simple. I decide to try simple text, specifically some lyrics from the theme song to one of my favourite TV shows, Firefly.
In my search I found this website that will generate a pattern for any text you input. They have a few different fonts to choose from and you can alter the sizing and spacing however you like, it’s fantastic. There are plenty of other free options out there as well, this just happened to be the first I found and it suited my purpose beautifully. I chose the colour purple for absolutely no reason and off I went.
I started out using perforated paper as my mom had some lying around, something I would soon come to regret. The paper was stiff so no frame was needed, but I found that if I made a mistake and put the needle through the wrong hole and removed it, the paper would stretch and the hole became very noticeable. Or maybe that’s just because I’m a perfectionist. My first experience also found me making mistakes on spacing, something that would continue through the next few projects. I won’t lie, it can make you a bit cross-eyed to keep counting those little holes so I just forgave the mistakes and continued. I raced through the project and had it complete in a week. I then decided to add some detail, because who doesn’t want to get a little fancy? I found a little pattern through a google search and had to stitch by eye (no pattern telling you spacing or counts, instead looking at a picture and trying your best to copy it), never an easy task. I’m quite pleased with the outcome (yet to be framed as it is an odd shape) and it launched me into my new hobby: making all the geeky cross stitches! Or at least a large percentage of them.