Last summer while cleaning up a flooded basement after a super heavy rainfall, I found a small plastic bin with long lost craft supplies. Most everything was past it’s prime – lots of no longer sticky stickers, crumpled and faded paper and dried out paint.
But one survivor was a cute little counted cross stitch kit.
It was a great distraction from the scheduled project of mopping and bleaching the basement floors.
After I finished up the little card, I looked for more cross stitch love, and was rewarded with a lot of cool work being done on a much larger scale – pegboards!
While they looked amazing, that scope of project is a little large, literally. It would be hard to get something that big home without help from Mr. SuzerSpace, and I’m not sure he’d be onboard with such a project. He’d probably point out that it would be difficult to hang in the end as well, and he would be right.
So I dropped the project. Until recently, when I realized that corrugated cardboard is plentiful where I work, so I fished out two different pieces from the recycling baler and brought them home. Using a ruler and a pencil, I drew a grid on the back of each and then set about searching the Internet for a good pattern. At this large scale and this smaller size, I had to be choosy about my artwork.
Right off the bat I found this and quickly drew that up on grid of the smaller piece. I used a nail to punch the holes where they needed to go. No hammer needed – just hold the nail very straight and puncture the cardboard at the meeting point of the grids that will need a cross sewn through. I found a wide-eyed needle needle marked “Canvas Repair” in my sewing box, and threaded some medium weight yarn through and began stitching.
TIP: I use dental floss threaders like these to thread needles. They sell a similar gadget at the sewing and craft stores, but pricing is better on these.
The heart design came together quickly, (so quickly that I didn’t even notice the recycling symbol is visible – THAT should have been the back side).
So I decided to up the ante. A little more searching yielded this cool alphabet generator. And since I’m on a “Yay! Every Day” kick this year, I plugged that in and downloaded the graph that it created for me. Luckily, it fit my grid. Next time I’m going to go the other way and find the pattern first and then figure out the scale of the grid I need.
In this close up you can see the holes punched with the nail before I’ve started stitching them.
I marked off my crosses on the grid on the larger sheet, and right before I started punching holes I realized that I needed to mark that layout reversed so it would read correctly from the right side. After fixing that, I punched the holes as needed and began threading.
This now hangs on the wall in my closet and it’s hard to not smile when I see it.
I’m sharing this project at several great link up parties. You should check them out.
