I bought three kits to work in an 8 inch hoop, all with flower designs on dark green backgrounds. I completed them more or less according to the patterns, only making a few tiny changes to make one of the flowers/its stem look a bit more realistic/to add in stems missing from the pattern so that they’d extend down to the base as with the other stems. I learned chain stitch. I also saw that massed French knots make a nice effect for the centre of daisies.

This is a set of three 6" hoops. With the Y I had planned to make the whole letter and surrounding as in the original but since I didn’t know how to use tracing paper, I tried tacking the paper to the cloth to create the outlines. This made a mess of the stitches when I pulled it off and tugged at the cloth, leaving marks. So, I used the stitches to guide a thread which I then completely overlayed (couched style) with more thread, so that everything looked tidy. I then had the outline of the Y.

Apologies for the bad lighting which makes it look like I've used two colours on the leaves - that's just a shadow.

I remembered having made an M from this set of kit years ago so when I decided to take up embroidery again, I went to look to see if there were any still available. I found a B on Ebay and decided to try that first. The design was printed on cotton, with needle, hoop, cotton threads and instructions provided. Due to being printed on (and the fact that this is not a fabric designed for cross-stitching), the cross-stitching is not precise.

This is the first piece of embroidery I can remember making which I still have.  It's from a kit, like pretty much all the pieces I made around then. I finished it in 1998. Because of how the pattern was printed, there is a wobbly look to some areas. I think I had to add my name and the date freehand, because I didn't know how about pens that could write on fabric, so that's off-centre. I started my PhD around this time, and around the time I finished my PhD, I had a baby, so there was a long gap of years in which I did no embroidery.