How I started stitching

I'm always interested in how others started their stitching journeys, so thought I'd share mine. I had always been somewhat creative and interested in crafts, but hadn't found my "thing". Anyway, I wound up hospitalised (for a total of 5 weeks!) when I was pregnant with DS #1 and the hospital had a trolley with various bits and pieces on it go around the wards. I bought a clown mobile kit to make from it and after I finished that my MIL brought me a teddy bear long stitch kit to do, which I completed in record time. Once DS was born and I was back in the real world, I bought a cheap and nasty stamped cross stitch kit. I can't even recall what the design was, just that you could not tell what colour went where as the lines were all over the place. In the end I tossed it.

From there I tried my hand at stitching a greeting card for my sister. I seem to recall the pattern came from a book, maybe from the library? It was an urn with flowers in it, and a small bird. Even back then I changed patterns to suit myself, as I decided to balance things up and add another bird on the other side, LOL. The rest, as they say, is history! Here's a pic of it, bottom row, middle card:

I can't really remember what the rest of the pictured designs are but I'll give it a shot. The top left one was another card for a baby in my mother's group. The design may have come from one of the UK magazines, Cross Stitch Crazy or Quick & Easy Cross Stitch maybe. The top middle design was for my step-grandmother and came from a book. The cat card (top right) was also for her, from a UK magazine again. The golfer one (bottom left) was for my dad, as was the bottom right seahorse design, both from a UK magazine.