I've been urging Laura for some time to find a hobby or two, something creative to reduce stress (to which she is prone, poor thing, but she comes by it honest, as my grandma used to say). Last week she said, out of the blue it seemed, "Mom, I want to do some cross-stitch." I nearly fell over. "Okay," I said casually, "do you have something in mind?" "No," she said, then gently so as not to hurt my feelings, "I'm not really big on alphabets, though." "Fair enough," I said, "well, there are a lot of free charts of all sorts of things on the internet for you to get your feet wet, as it were." A few days later, she said, "I found these on the DMC website," two small vignettes of the Earth and Mars, and Jupiter and Saturn.
I had enough threads already for the Earth and Mars, and so she started with that, the only change being that I suggested a shade lighter yellow for the stars (743 instead of 742). She picked it up satisfyingly quickly, and to the pleasant surprise of both of us she enjoyed it enormously -- she has shown little interest in hobbies, really, not an interest that "takes," at least.
The chart's Jupiter didn't look quite right to my eye, so I offered to tweak it a bit for Laura, and came up with this --
Laura had already looked up, in the middle of Earth and Mars, and said, "I could do all of the planets, and frame them in a group!" and so I took the liberty of making charts for Mercury and Venus, and for Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. Since the original DMC charts are free, it seems only right to add mine to what's available for the general public, in case anyone else wants the whole solar system! --
- Stars 743 (a change from the original charts' 742)
- Venus beige stripes 754, pink stripes 760
- Mercury light brown 426, medium brown 420
- Stars 743 (a change from the original charts' 742)
- Pluto 800
- Uranus 798, rings 415
- Neptune 799, spots 800
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