A belated introduction

The blog isn’t really “brand new” any more, so I think it might be about time to introduce myself a little better.

As it says over on the right column of the page, my name is Linda Williams. I live in Sydney Australia with my husband and daughter. I’m 32 years old, and I work from home in financial planning.

That’s the boring stuff out of the way. 

I have been cross stitching so long that I can’t remember what my first cross stitch design was (but it probably had something to do with teddy bears). Sewing of one type or another is ingrained into my family. My Mum learned to quilt when I was a baby, and has developed into a textile artist whom I respect a great deal (more about her later!).  Both my grandmothers quilt, and I have a set of hand-made cloth alphabet blocks that was made for me as a child. My aunt quilts and embroiders, my cousin embroiders … 

I think you get the idea.

And that’s only the women in the family. My dad is also an avid cross stitcher. He designs his own geometric patterns and stitches the most beautiful and unique bookmarks you’ve ever seen. I have quite a collection!

So it really was inevitable that I would get into stitching. I stitched a little when I was a kid, and then lost all interest in high school (“Ew, cross stitch?? How uncool!”). 

But when I was 16, I had a nasty break-up with a long-term boyfriend (long-term being six months at that age), so I was searching for something to distract me. I found a pattern in a Dutch cross stitching magazine my parents owned which immediately caught my attention. It was the biggest design I had ever seen, and it was guaranteed to keep me entertained for ages!

I finished it in three months.

From there, I was hooked. I stitched every angel or Mirabilia pattern I could get my hands on. I think my parents were a bit concerned around HSC time, particularly when I started an origami phase at that point and decided I was going to fold 1,000 cranes instead of studying, but I got through okay. 

After university, having come to the conclusion that a career in Egyptology wasn’t for me, I lucked into a job at a craft magazine called Homespun. Seeing other people’s work published inspired me to start designing my own patterns, and Stitches by Kryss was born! My first design was published not long afterwards (more on that here), and then I opened up my first website. Of course, no one knew it was there, and I didn’t know the first thing about publicising myself! But I kept stitching and designing, and then discovered the wonderful world of Etsy. 

Which pretty much brings me to today. I’m constantly looking at the world around me and seeing potential designs, some of which work and some of which don’t. I’m working on a few new designs based on vintage Australian magazine covers which I’m pretty excited about. More on those soon!

See you around.