Some Treasured Needlework

My late husband and I always had multiple hobbies and tried many, many things. My daughter used to kid us and said we had the "hobby of the month". He always had an HO railroad layout - the one in Kansas City was huge and very cool. He was a railroader from the time he was 17 years old. He also loved to build model planes - tissue paper pinned and glued over a stick skeleton then painted. Even had one with a gas engine at one time. Then there was photography - he bought a lot of dark room equipment and cameras from a fellow he worked with and set up a dark room in our basement. That was lots of fun - he made our Christmas cards for several years. When he retired we took a folk art painting class together and he would cut out things for us to paint. I still have some of the cute stuff we did at Christmas time. Then there was the whirligig and windtoys that he made. Our backyard fence had a whirligig on each post. I kidded him and said that when a wind came up the whole backyard would take off. He made lots of them and we would go to craft fairs where he would sell them - not for the need of money but just for the joy of having someone want something he had made. He also took up another hobby - counted crossstitch. I was doing that one day and he said, "I think I could do that." So I found an easy pattern, the cloth and floss and showed hime how. Well, he turned out the most beautiful crossstitch - always on very small count cloth and complicated patterns. There were some by P. Buckley Moss that he loved to do. I will put one in this post. It was a picture of two pretty little quilters which I actually had started but gave up on it. He finished it beautifully and I found a wonderful antique frame in an antique shop in Lacon, Illinois, and we framed it. A treasure, for sure. Then there are a little boy and girl he did that are just so pretty. I took the pictures at an angle so the flash would not reflect. I think you can still see how lovely his work was. (Click pictures to enlarge)