Uncounted Cross-Stitch

A new-old hobby, reimagined

Prior to—and also not counting—online art tutorials on places like Domestika, I have only ever taken two art classes in my life. So most of the art I’ve ever made, with only a few recent exceptions due to the aforementioned online art tutorials, is the result of experimenting. Textile crafts, on the other hand, people (sometimes my mom, sometimes other women older than I am) have attempted to teach me. The ones that have stuck with me are counted cross-stitch (learned from my mom), knitting (learned from my friend Barb when we worked together at a living history museum), and crocheting (learned from Miss Jean, one of my camp volunteers when I worked at a different church).

Thing is, I also go through arts and crafts phases. For example, about five years ago, I had returned to my favorite experimental medium, watercolor. Then it was found-object sculptures. Then it was pen-and-watercolor doodles on pages of old books, primarily A Tale of Two Cities. Then it was poured acrylics. At one point during the poured acrylic year, I poured paints all over one of the panes of glass in one of those two-sided frame things. (It’s a frame without an opaque back, so you could theoretically have a picture or whatever on both sides.) It was cool looking when I put it in the window, but…also a little bit boring.

Then I was digging through art supplies for some other purpose I guess, and ran across a half-finished Teresa Wentzler cross-stitch project I gave up on sometime in the mid-nineties.

Someone is selling this pattern on eBay if you would like to try your hand at it

When I say half-finished, I literally mean half-finished. Evidently I decided to block it out and just work on the top half first, which was fortunate, because it means it still looks like something even though the bottom half never materialized. Alas, that project and one other one (also a Wentzler design, I believe) were complex enough that I didn’t finish either one before I got bored of that particular artistic expression, and it’s one I never returned to, so they languish. Until, that is, I happened to paint-pour that pane of glass and discover The Castle within a month or so of each other. I bit the bullet, cut a rough outline of the cross-stitch project, and stuck it in the frame. Looks pretty great, I think. I’m going to try to sell it at my book signing and art sale in June, but if you want to purchase it before then, you can grab it at The Art Trundle.

Mixed Media Fantasia created by Jennifer A. G. Layte 2023. (Only now do I see that you can see my old phone-camera lens in the center of this image. Oh well.) This piece does especially well in a window.

This year, I have finally gotten back into cross-stitch itself. Only…without the counting.

In 2012, on my last trip to Ireland, I bought a top from New Look that I really loved and still really love, even though I guess it’s probably not a new look anymore. It is mostly made out of a stretchy flannel-y knit, but the bodice had a machine-embroidered cotton insert. Eventually the cotton insert deteriorated, and so last year I took this panel of burlap-looking (but much less itchy) material I had snagged from an old Starbucks retail display in 2006, which I had already cut into for another clothing project, and made a new bodice insert for that top.

This winter, I’ve been embroidering my own design into it, freehand. It’s like drawing, with pixels or mosaics, but the material is thread. I’m not an embroidery artist like my cousin Kate, who can make all the stitches and illustrate almost anything in thread. But I’m pleasantly surprised at what I was able to manage, with a bunch of thread x’s.

After I finished this, I realized that it's kind of a wintery shirt for a daffodil design, but daffodils are my favorite flower, not least because the straddle the seasons.

In spite of some necessary tear-outs and do-overs, it proved to be really fun. So I took the second of those Starbucks panels, which has not yet become anything, and started free-hand embroidering something else. We’ll see if it comes out as I envision. So far the heart came out just right.