About your Two Grimalkins, Alesia & Sue.
We’re Alesia Matson and Sue Grainger. We “met” in 1991 on “FidoNet” in a forum/chat room/extended email list for role playing gamers. Our common interests casually mentioned led to us to link up via ICQ (old chatroom tech that’s still functioning!). We soon discovered an array of similarities and mutual preferences that we’ve actually continued to build on to this day. Computer communications, our children and husbands, baseball, fantasy role playing games, cats, chocolate, paganism/witchcraft, counted cross stitching, music, reading, writing… We vector into some of these things differently, but our love for them, and for each other, has remained constant ever since.
If it’s an evenweave fabric, one of us has likely stitched something on it from a selection fibers. These include but aren’t limited to cotton, linen, rayon, silk, and wool. Our finishes range from professionally framed wall art to hand-stitched pillow art and hot-glued ornaments, to just about everything else you can think of to wear or display this very specialized form of pixellated fiber art.
Then Grimalkin Crossing happened…
In 2017 Alesia took the plunge into cross stitch design first, and created this site as an online home for Clitarita and the slew of design inspirations that followed. The title riffs on our appreciation for an old word that’s fallen out of common use and the name of the hobby itself—which has always been an outlier among crafts. We like to think that a “grimalkin crossing” is a safe place. It’s for everyone who loves the fiber arts to gather for a celebration of counted cross stitch, particularly. We wanted a shop and a site that upheld our values: decency, integrity, kindness, courage, caring, and an inclusive tolerance that doesn’t have to include being tolerant of bigotry or hatred. And we hope our designs will always reflect that creed.
One other thing about your grimalkins: Though we’ve always lived far apart, we still try to get together at least once a year for a retreat. We don’t always manage it, but when we do there is much stitching, chocolate, coffee, laughs, stitching, long, intimate talks, extended comfortable silences, dinners in and dinners out, usually some baseball, and did we mention stitching?
Sign up for our irregular newsletter, The Grimalkin Gazette, so you don’t miss out on our latest stuff! Our love of stitching remains centered love and a desire to share that with you and every other grimalkin-loving stitcher (and weaver, spinner, dyer, &c) who can love us back.
More about your grimalkins…
Alesia’s Bio:
Currently, Alesia’s living in northern coastal California on the traditional lands of the Wiyot people, and acknowledges the custodianship of their Elders past, present, and future.
My California odyssey started in rural SW Ohio, where I was born and raised. I left for college in KY (was Morehead State University then) as a music major in 1979. I lost myself and ended up back in OH for awhile, where I married and had the first of two children. The second was born at the U.S. Army hospital at Ft. Polk, LA.
From there we bounced to Fitzsimmons AMC in Denver CO, and then to Ft. Hood TX, where that husband and I split up for good. I came to California in 1992 and set up a new life that eventually included a new husband (Hello Michael!) and found myself as a writer. Along the way, I tried a lot of things. I’ve loved learning all my life, so I educated myself about child development when I had little ones, in my twenties. That study led me into learning about the complex, three-dimensional realms of human development, expanding my interest in psychology and emotional well-being, and an enduring passion for comparative mythology and symbolism.
Moved by a sincere desire to help as many people as we could, my husband and I founded a non-profit charity/religious organization in the early 00’s. We weren’t interested in preaching anybody’s gospel or converting anyone to anything. Instead, we just tried to help people, however and wherever we found them. Also while working full time jobs and rearing teen-aged boys. And we inexorably broke our finances, and ourselves. This was my first experience with burn-out, though we didn’t call it that, then. We dissolved the nonprofit. Michael went back to contracting. I had to begin taking my mental symptoms seriously, and got serious about treating my own long-term depression.
Perimenopause happened in this interval. It was a hell-ride for me. But I came back from hell—and I wasn’t empty-handed. I’ll be sharing more about this in our blog as we expand into covering menopause, aging, and mental health in addition to cross stitch.
My second experience with burn-out was when I tried being the CEO of a fantasy fiction publishing company, and spent most of my time in the misguided attempt to write a third book while promoting the first two. The time and timing were awful. I was in a postmenopausal slide, without anyone in my daily life who could intervene and tell me so. By the time the crash happened, it was 2016. And we all remember the avalanche of horror of that was 2016. Somehow, my old, outworn, and very mistaken ideas about who I was got buried under the rubble pile.
Coming back to wellness with cross stitch
The road back to myself—again—was through music, and counted cross stitch. Stitching gave me time to reflect on who I’d been versus who I wanted to be. Music gave me the courage to feel again, to dream again. Cross stitch design, and writing about the designs I publish, has given me my voice back, when I had begun to think I’d lost it forever.
I’ve been educating myself ever since on what it takes to be a “well human” in this post-modern, post-meaning world. Self-recovery has been fraught with perils, including a recent hip injury that set me back for a bit. But I’m here, I’m back, excited to share what I’ve learned AND for the opportunity to go on learning. Grimalkin Crossing is about that, about us learning from one another, learning how to live together as well human beings, in peace.
Sue’s Bio:
Sue lives near Seattle, Washington. When she’s ready to make her debut on this site, she’ll fill in this section. Until then, you can know that I love her a lot, and it’s a ground-level truth that I wouldn’t be here without her. She is kind, pragmatic, funny, a loyal wife, an exemplary mother, and the best girlfriend I’ve ever, ever had.