I’ve recently gotten into cross stitching. I realize this makes me about the equivalent of a 90 year old woman. My friend Maggie came over to watch football in November and brought the project she was working on and I watched her do it and realized 1. it looked super cool and 2. it looked super easy. And I was bored and unemployed and so I taught myself to cross stitch!

I made my sister a tiny elephant first, for practice, and then took on a massive project (one I was way too new to understand just how massive it was until it was over). December is my boyfriend’s birthday, our anniversary, and Christmas, and I was unemployed and thread costs 49 cents a spool, so I decided it was obviously in my best interest to cross stitch him something. But I wanted it to be cool and unique and feel like a big present, even if it was home made. So I thought forever about what he liked enough for me to make, and decided to do a map of Cornwall, where he claims to be from (he was actually born in Devon, but let’s not get into it). So I emailed a bunch of old women in Cornwall who were selling patterns, and they all insisted on snail mail instead of emailing a pdf, and that was going to take too long! I was worried I wouldn’t finish on time! (This is a joke because no matter what there was zero chance I’d ever finish on time, but like I said, I was young and naive). So I made my own design. This was insane and involved quite a bit of stopping and correcting things as I perfected the design and how I wanted it to look. Cut to TWO MONTHS later and 25 days past Christmas, I finished! And I think it came out beautifully, if I do say so myself. You can barely see the mistakes I made–I even swapped the East and West back to their rightful places! ?

Now I’m working on an elephant design for my mom (can you tell elephants are a theme in my family?) and I’m LOVING it. It’s coming together quite quickly–it’s been a week and I’d say I’m 40% done, which is insane considering I work 60 hours a week and am only working on it about an hour a day (I was putting in a solid 10 hour day for weeks at a time on that map!).

I have a bunch of other stuff I want to do as well, and I’m slowly finding the patterns for everything. It’s just so fun, and makes me feel creative in a way I never have before. Also it does WONDERS for my anxiety. I think it’s my version of meditation and those anxiety-reducing coloring books rolled into one.