xoxox

One day when I was trying to make my leaky Greenwich flat more homely I bought some cheap but nice picture frames to put photos in. Having spent ages trying to decide exactly which photos I was going to put in them (and failing) and then discovering I didn't have any ink in my printer to print them anyhow I abandoned them.

When I finally sorted out my room in the Kilburn flat I found them again and put them up on the wall. The plan was that I would be forced to fill the still-empty frames because who hangs empty ones?

Me, it seems.

I still couldn't choose the pictures to put in them. Photos of myself were self-loving, photos of my family would embarrass them, photos of landscapes were OK but didn't really match the colour of the room, pictures of my cats made me look like a cat-lady…I think about these things too much.

For at least 6 months they were empty on the wall while I tried to figure out this extremely serious problem. Then I had one of my occasional spurts of energy and decided I'd make a cross-stitch for each one. They'd be old-fashioned but modern at the same time and the colours would match the room and they'd be something no-one else had! They would be the answer to the question I had spent months* thinking about.

Obviously I spent another lifetime deciding on and then designing the cross stitch patterns I'd use but to cut a long story short, here they are! Three out of the four frames are now filled…I like to think of the empty one as a tribute to the good old days when they were nothing more than an idea**

*about 30 seconds every week over multiple months…

** not a sign of having become disinterested in cross stitch again.