I was all prepared for what I was going to write about this morning, but plans changed when I discovered something last night (so that planned topic will just get pushed off until next time…) As I think my readers know, I design cross stitch, canvaswork, and blackwork patterns and sell them as WorksByABC.  (Yes, my initials really are ABC.)  My primary venue for selling has been (and I will be continuing) my Etsy store.  However, one of my goals this fall was getting my name

This needlework piece of mine holds a particularly special place in my heart: It is “Wheels of Color”, designed by Genny Morrow. It was the first real canvaswork piece I ever did.  It was the first time I worked on stretcher bars – even learned what they were.  It was the needlework piece that I was working on when I moved from a two-year stint of living outside of Washington DC in Northern VA to where I live now in New Jersey.  But, perhaps most importantly, it was the first

It’s been a week since I last posted – hope everyone (in the US) enjoyed a good Thanksgiving holiday! In my last blog post, I began talking about a large project, a major milestone in my stitching life in fact.  Here is the photo from near the end of that post: This pattern is called “From Molehill to Mountain: A Study in Stitch Variation” by Pamela H. Gardner.  Not only did I learn so much about stitch variations in canvas work from doing this piece, I learned so much about

I knew I wanted to spend a little time on this blog talking about a big needlework project I did some time ago and all that I learned from it.  It might take two or three posts for me to share everything that I want to about this.  But, I do need to start with a pretty big disclaimer.  I will be talking about this: It is a self-published pattern book (it is not numbered in the traditional sense, but I’m guessing at least 150 pages), spiral bound, titled From Molehill to Mount

Well, it seems like I’ve let a week slip by since my last post.  I really didn’t mean for that to happen, as I knew what I wanted to write about next.  But, well, life happens.  And things get in the way.  I suspect many of you totally get that. I love me a good used booksale for all the treasures to be found, for books never known about, heard about, ever seen before.  That said, it doesn’t mean that I’m against buying a new book every once in awhile.  I’m pretty picky when

This past weekend, I was fortunate to spend a beautiful fall day at Winterthur in DE.  If you are anywhere near the region, it is well worth a visit. If you’ve never heard of it, a brief description from Winterthur’s website: “Almost 60 years ago, collector and horticulturist Henry Francis du Pont (1880–1969) opened his childhood home, Winterthur, to the public. Today, Winterthur (pronounced “winter-tour”) is the premier museum of American decorative arts, with an unparallele

In my other world (as opposed to my needlework world), I am a middle school math teacher.  And I only bring this up today because it is relevant to the story I am telling. Some of you may already have known about the math side of me.  Some of you may have already seen some of that come out in the sometimes (but certainly not always) geometric nature of some of my designs.  A number of years ago, I became more and more interested in the cross section between math and art, on a

(Side note before I even get started on the main focus of this blog post:  I was just googling “cross pollination” to see if it was really what I wanted to use for the title.  Because, as you can imagine, this is going to have nothing to do with fertilization of plants or anything in the gardening realm.  🙂  I was actually surprised that secondary definitions of the term – such as I am thinking about it – didn’t immediately pop up.  Basically all of the results on the first

This past weekend, I was at my LNS (local needlework store), which currently has my trunk show of models.  While there, I was talking to a couple of the customers/stitchers about one of the pieces and so it has just been on my mind the last couple of days. While, yes, the pattern for this is available for purchase in my Etsy store (here for the paper pattern and here for the pdf version), the story behind the creation is very different than nearly all the other cross stitch p