When I was little my grandma had petit point pictures of The Blue Boy and The Pink Lady in her house. I so loved the way the thread looked against the delicate mesh it was stitched into. Needlepoint just didn’t hold the same allure to me.

My mom had a series of petit point pictures on our staircase. I think I was about 8 or 9 when I learned how to embroider, I’m not sure when I first tried petit point. I do remember working on a poppy in a bowl pattern that took forever. I think it was a pattern my mom started and gave up on.

It was epic as far as needlework goes! I did finish it at some point (university maybe?) and I think I gave it to my mom but I have no idea what eventually happened to it.

That experience stopped any stitching desires for a long time.

And now, here I am, creating keys in methods I used as a child.

Luckily I was able to get some mesh petit point scraps from our local knitting emporium. The mesh isn’t readily available these days and what I could find on-line was very expensive! If you’ve been following along you’ll know that I’ve chosen 10 keys to revisit through this childhood memory process. I made a few very small keys too, bringing my key total up to 1628.

I took the 10 key drawings that I’ve chosen for this project and traced them onto graph paper. Initially I coloured in some of the squares to complete my pattern making- but it was just as easy to choose the colours as I went along so I quickly abandoned that process.

The actual stitching was entirely enjoyable - I remember why I liked doing this when I was younger. Following my make-shift patterns wasn’t always enjoyable though. So I decided to just wing it a bit. I ended up taking out the stitches on one of the keys because it was just a bit too wingy with my “freehand”. I also redrew some of the patterns so that they were more consciously lined up with the squares on the graph paper. After a few weeks of trial and error I eventually found my groove and came to an enjoyable place where I sort of followed the pattern and I sort of just eyeballed what looked good to me. Hah - a metaphor for how I navigate life!

I’m pretty happy with the results and somewhat sad to have finished this section of the 5000 Keys (although I do have one nice scrap of mesh left so the possibility of more petit point is still there for me).