I'm 37 years old. Never been much of a craftsy person. Have always had the skill to draw but never really kept at it and never attempted anything outside of just drawing with a standard pencil and that's it, no painting, no sculpting, no sewing, or anything else, until one day cross-stitching caught my eye.
I started cross-stitching back in 2004, how I got into it, I can't recall, but do know the influence was video game related. My first cross-stitching supplies I got for Christmas 2003, a totally different thing to ask for than the usual which were video games, but I was quite happy and had all kinds of things in mind to cross-stitch, video game sprites of coarse. I didn't get a whole lot of colors, so had to work with what I had, also the only images I had at the time to go by were those in my Nintendo Power magazines, but for the most I was able to recreate some characters in as close to their pixel likeness as I could.
The very first cross-stitched character I did was from one of my all time favorite games then, the Plutonium Boss, the final boss of the NES game Blaster Master. After that I did a dozen or so other characters from various NES games, all taken from the best images I could find in my game magazines. I rather enjoyed it, but somehow not long after getting into it I just kinda lost interest and stopped altogether, I think some of that had to do with the frustrations involved with craft, I really did not have the patience for it then, I was a beginner expecting too much of myself. I tried to pick up cross-stitching again in 2008, only did a couple tiny pieces within a few days time from each other, and once again put it down not to pick it back up again for a while.
Next time I started back up cross-stitching was at the beginning of 2011, but this time I intended to stick with it, I wanted to have a skill for myself other than just being able to play video games well, something I can create myself and be proud of. But cross-stitching was going slow, I was only picking it up occasionally, not as often as I hoped I would. And also I kept looking back at my old works and realizing that their quality was very poor, I improved quite a bit from when I started earlier in the year but still had a lot to learn. I wanted my projects to look good both front and back, unlike my earliest ones anything I do now would have to be not only neat on the front, but also clean looking on the back, not a mess as my earlier projects, I was aiming, and still am, at making them look like professional art pieces.
Last year I had a few commissioned projects for a few members over at NintendoAge. I also started a couple very large projects of my own, a couple I finished, and a few I still have yet to finish. But still wasn't sure where I was on this whole cross-stitching thing, what I really wanted to do, actually I wanted to cross-stitch everything practically, but they all take so darn long to do. Do I do this one next, or that one? This one'll take me months to do, can I really stick it out to the end? Or should I do multiple smaller ones so I don't get bored of doing the same thing? I lack long term attention span, which is one of several reasons why I stick with gaming mostly on the NES, short and sweet. I ended up putting the more grand ideas aside for the time being and focus on the smaller stuff, making characters from some of my favorite games.
I'm still relatively new to cross-stitching, probably have only done a full months worth of work so far in the year+ time span that I've exposed myself to it, and even though I was uncertain about it at first, over the past several months I've found myself a new kind of enjoyment and am actually cross-stitching now with most of my free time, barely gaming at all which is quite odd for me. I take my cross-stitch stuff with me everywhere I go, just in case. I get a break at work, 10-15 minutes, cross-stitch. After I get off from work and while waiting for my mom to get off from her job, cross-stitch. So I'm really into it now.
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