I started cross stitching when I was 11 years old... Mami is a seamstress and had a shop, so it was requisite to learn how to sew. I knew the basics already, since I was largely in charge of "desvanar" that is, there'd be me in my living room with tiny scissors undoing whatever someone in Mami's shop had sewn wrong. By then I also knew how to "sew a straight line," and had already taken a class to learn how to cut out shirts and skirts and pants out of pieces of fabric. Dolls were very well dressed at my house. But when it got to the other arts - knitting and crocheting, arts that my sisters excelled at, I was pretty much "a zero to the left". Enter Wendy Paola.
Wendy Paola and I were close friends, and were in the same class for 6 years. I can't number all the firsts I shared with Wendy. Her mom was a knitting teacher, so Wendy was very knowledgeable when it came to all that. And then one day, while I complained about my crocheting homework, she introduced me to cross stitching. It couldn't be simpler: you took needle and thread, a fabric that was already measured with the holes at an equal distance, and you made a cross, and another, and another, until a pattern/picture came out of that.
Fast forward sixteen years later, and I am quitting my job and moving to Ireland. Unbeknown to me, an economic crisis is almost upon the world. I am nervous as hell that I am not going to be able to pay the rent and that I'm making a big mistake by quitting my job. Here's where the cross stitching pattern "Band of Brothers" saved my life. I started that piece in August in 2008, in need of calm, in need of peace of mind, and of something cheap that would occupy my time. Looking at this pattern I can trace the very tumultuous but also awesome period of time that was Fall 2008 till Summer 2009, which is when I actively stopped working on it. In its crosses I can find heartache and tears and smiles and uncontrollable laughter, just as well as hunger, boredom, and days upon days of working on it "just to do something." Even though I seriously dislike cats (since they are evil and will steal your soul) I chose the pattern because it was three, because it was meant to represent me and my friends, musketeers without the tag line, together about to move on to the "Finally, we graduated, now what?" part of our lives.
Now, two years after the first stitches were sewn, I've finally finished Band of Brothers. I'm glad that the three of us still stand, together, regardless of how vastly different our lives now are. Now I just gotta figure out what I'm going to do with this thing. Because Cats? They're Evil.
