#28 Complete a counted cross stitch piece

I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama... and my family vacationed in Longboat Key, Florida, which is an hour south of Tampa, FL.  And it was a 12 hour drive to get from Huntsville (which is at the top of Alabama) to LBK.

As a young kid, 12 hours in a car is miserable.  So I did a lot of reading (probably one of the key reasons why I like to read so much), and, for variety, my Mom also taught me how to do counted cross stitch, which is a type of embroidery where you make tiny little x's out of colored threads to form a pattern.  Unlike needlepoint, where the design is imprinted on the fabric, with counted cross stitch, you start with a blank white cloth and have to count the little squares to know where to begin with the various colored fabrics... hence the term "counted cross stitch."

To learn counted cross stitch, I began small and worked my way up to larger pieces.  One of those larger pieces is a swan in a blue pond with lilly pads... I completed it in high school as part of those long road trips back and forth between Alabama and Florida.  It's currently hanging in my sister and brother-in-law's stairwell in Pittsburgh:

The second larger piece that I completed is very meaningful to me.  I completed it during the summer after my junior year in high school, when my parents and I were road-tripping around the USA on college visits.  I finished this piece right around the time we arrived in the great city of Pittsburgh... which I find is telling in a subtle way, considering that I finished it at the destination where I would live for the next four years...

So you can see, I've done some large and complicated pieces.  But, similar to my story about why I don't read that much unless I'm on vacation, I haven't spent much time working on counted cross stitch.  I am currently working on a Christmas stocking, and I take it out every once in a while and work a few rows of stitches, but I haven't made noticeable progress. So this challenge - #28 Complete a counted cross stitch piece - originally started so I could motivate myself to make some serious progress on the Christmas stocking...

...but then the rest of the challenge took over my life and I continued to make no progress.  I was thinking of calling this one a failure, and then, when I was cleaning out a drawer, a tiny little counted cross stitch piece fell out... one that I've been carrying around with me for YEARS... it's a small piece that is great for a beginner.  In fact, it's similar to one of three others I completed as a beginner. These pieces turn in to ornaments, and the other three always decorate my Christmas tree every year.

When I saw that unopened package lying there, I had an "AHA!" moment where I realized that I might actually be able to pull this one off!

So I began to work on it...

The blueprint and the blank slate...

Just starting out....

Making progress...

Finished with the colors!  Now I need to add the outlines (known as "backstitch")

Done with the backstitch!  Cross stitch complete!!!

And now it's been mounted, framed with "garland" and ready for Christmas...

So the moral of this story? If at first you bite off too much to chew... see if you can do something smaller instead :).  Now, I've satisfied another item in my challenge, and I'm one step closer to being done!!!