My Very First Project

As part of the on-going clutter-busting, I've been sorting through some of my crafting materials, getting ready for the yard sale in June. I found the first piece of cross-stitch I ever attempted in with some other stitched but otherwise unfinished pieces I had.

I stitched this, I think, in the summer of 1988. It was meant to be a bookmark for my friend, who's the one who first introduced me to the concept of cross-stitching. I'm not even sure why we would have had the fabric in the house, since none of my family cross-stitches. I don't remember having a pattern to use. I think I was just making it up as I went along. Since it's left-right centered, I probably charted out the name ahead of time. As you can see, I didn't quite have the trick of top-bottom centering yet.

This languished in a desk drawer in my grandmother's house, which is where I found it when Mom and I were cleaning out the house after Grandma had to be moved into a nursing home. It was still in the hoop when I found it. I've tried cleaning it, but short of bleaching it, I don't think there's much that can be done.

Now it'll go back into storage, as the inaugural and permanent member of my FUFO* stash.

*FUFO = Finished Unfinished Object, which means it's been stitched but not otherwise finished into it's final form. The stitching community should consider changing this to SUFO instead.