Arts & Crafts in Quarantine
WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY BY HOLLIE GARDNER.
When the quarantine hit and everyone began to take up hobbies to pass the time, I made my way to Spotlight after watching my mum work on a cross-stitch she’s had for years. I snatched up what was left of the correct materials and began to delve into the wonderful world of cross-stiching and embroidery. I used the designs that a friend in my Dungeons & Dragons group had drawn (with her permission, of course), and traced them onto the fabric. The repetitive motion of threading the needle in a criss-cross pattern was addictive and a great way to listen to some podcasts. I was finally finding quarantine a little less unbearable. The trickiest part of this new project was making sure the threads all flowed the same way. There were a few times when my squares went from left-to-right, then right-to-left, and sometimes I didn’t notice until I had completely finished the piece. I switched to a backstitch for the silhouette of the figures against the coloured shapes, which revealed another issue I had to overcome (aida cloth is great for cross-stitch, but terrible for regular embroidery it turns out). I had to learn how to keep the length of each stitch consistent. My favourite piece I’ve made is ‘The Barbarian’ as pictured in this article. I’d finally gotten the hang of what I was doing and the stars just seemed to align. The lines are neat and consistent, the cross-stitch is near perfect, and I even got the character’s scar just right.
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Once I had completed this six-piece D&D project, I stumbled onto a tutorial for sew-on patches and fell into another handmade-crafting rabbit hole. The first patch I made of my friend’s chibi design of her elf rogue character—also pictured in this article—I gave it to her as a gift. My second patch, and current sewing project is one of the robots from Laputa: Castle in the Sky. I used the classic satin-stitch on both of these embroidered patches to mimic the look of the cool patches you find on Etsy. I even went out and bought a packet of Heat ‘N Bond to back the patch and have the option to iron the patch on instead of stitching. It was a lot of fun matching the correct colours and taking (multiple) trips to Spotlight to get the correct thread (always double-check the colours you do have so you don’t end up buying the same yellow twice), but hand-sewing is a lot less fun when you start finding coloured thread everywhere.
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No matter how bad quarantine got, and even if the COVID-19 situation gets worse in sweet, sweet South Australia, I can say that something good did come of it. I’m proud of my projects and glad I got to discover a new hobby.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article has been reuploaded and was originally published in 2020.