"Oh," people exclaim, "that must be very relaxing for you."
Relaxing?! Are you kidding??
As I said in the headline, I suffer, really suffer, from OCD: obsessive cross-stitch disorder.
When I start something, I want to finish it as soon as possible, which means I spend all my free, waking hours on it - to the exclusion of everything else.
Sure, I do any translation work that comes my way and I manage to send out invoices at the end of the month, but housework, keeping fit, going out, reading, meeting people...all such activities fall by the wayside. It is horrendous.
Hour after hour, I sit and stitch. I forget to drink; I barely move - even if I'm in an uncomfortable position. And all over my home, little bits of embroidery yarn show up as I just let the bits that I cut off fall onto the floor or onto my clothes and you can then estimate how far from the table where I'm doing the work you are by how densely spread the bits of yarn on the floor are.
Last year, I sent my aunts in Berlin a tablecloth each for Easter.
When I went to visit them in January this year, I saw that one aunt still had the tablecloth on her dining table. I returned home determined that they should have more, so I found two designs for the summer and spent at least two months working on them in my free time.
One summer design:
And the other:
Two evenings ago, I finally managed to finish the two tablecloths for autumn for them. Hundreds of hours again. And, as work has been rather sparse this year, this means I could start work on them at 8 in the morning and carry on until 10 at night. Thank heavens for primewire.mx. Without all the series I've watched through that website, I would not have been so well entertained.
This is one design for the autumn:
And this is the other:
But now I feel free! No more cross-stitch projects are on the horizon. I am free! Free! Woohoo!
Now, there are just a few small blankets I want to crochet for Christmas presents this year....
Wow! Beautiful works!
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