I’ve always enjoyed doing craft work as a hobby. Perhaps it comes from being an engineer and wanting to make things? I suppose these days my main craft hobby is pottery, but I also knit, sew and embroider amongst other things. But one thing I’d never done is counted cross stitch. Until, that is, I was given a kit of St Michael’s Mount as a birthday present.
I soon realised why I’d never attempted counted cross stitch before. You start with a blank piece of canvas with 14 holes to the inch (that’s an awful lot of stitches!), a printed out page of graph paper with a virtually indecipherable key on it, and a load of skeins of embroidery thread, in this case in twenty subtly different colours. I wasn’t sure whether my eyesight, patience, or manual dexterity was up to the job, or which one would give out first! But I thought I really ought to give it a go, since it was a present. I could only embroider for a few hours a day maximum, and only sitting in the window seat in the living room, where there was enough strong natural light to see by. And if the sun went behind a cloud I had to stop sewing!
It took all summer, but fortunately I finished it before the clocks went back. I took it to our local framers to be mounted, and I’m very pleased with how it’s turned out. I have to say I’m in no hurry to do another one though!
St Michael’s Mount
