Stitching: The Neighborhoods Project

About a year ago, I decided to pick cross-stitching back up, completely out of the blue. My mom had taught me to stitch when I was a teen, and for a while I stitched up a fury. I wasn't as technically or artistically gifted as my mom (and probably never will be!), but I was good enough to be able to make stuff that didn't totally suck. I appreciated the repetitive feel of stitching, and I was pretty good at it as my hands are bony and my fingers long and dexterous. But then, because I was a teen with the attention span of a flea, I stopped and picked up some other hobby or activity. Picking it back up over a decade later was not something I ever expected. I enjoyed it for a while and started making cross-stitched cassette tapes. In the last year that I've been stitching, I've switched from cloth to thick sheets of bristol paper and cross-stitches to straight-stitches. Last year I was able to participate in Handmade Arcade, and I hope to return when it happens late in 2012. I'm in the process of reworking and updating my Etsy store and coming up with new stitching ideas. Outside of making stitchings to sell, I've been working on The Neighborhoods Project - stitching a 4 x 6-sized outline of every neighborhood in Pittsburgh. I'm not sure what the actual completeness of this project with be, but I've been donating Sunday mornings to stitching the next 6-8 neighborhoods in order alphabetically. Here's a sneak peak of the fruits of my labors of the past three or four weeks: