Secret Santa Gift (DON'T LOOK IF WE WENT TO HIGH SCHOOL TOGETHER) (Patreon)

Ok, so, I got in contact with a handful of ladies that I went to high school with. This is unusual because 1) I was not friends or in the social circles of these women, and 2) this happened via a chance meeting at a cafe, not through the internet, and 3) we all went to school in Seattle and now we live in Portland. 

It started just with two of them, because they did maintain their friendship after graduation and eventually both wound up here in our weirdo city to the south of our hometown. So they'd get together for dinner on a somewhat regular basis and then another former classmate that they'd stayed in contact with was going through a breakup and one was like 'dude, come here, you can crash with me'. So there were the three, right? And sometime after that, one of them spotted me in the cafe and while we were catching up I invited myself to join their monthly dinner and then two more of our former classmates joined on after that. 

While we weren't friends in school, I did like them, admired them, uh, (cough) had a crush on one of them (With her blessing, I wrote a comic about it just for DAR: Volume 2. It's outta print, but $5 patrons have a digital copy or you can buy it through my store. Wait. Sorry. I didn't mean to turn this into an ad. I'm just. I'm just sayin' is all.)

 I mean, we're at the worst version of ourselves when we're teenagers, lord only knows, but even then I knew these were interesting, creative, smart, funny, hard working people. And now, as adults? It's been so gratifying to see that my perception of them wasn't due to me putting them on a pedestal as the kind of girls I wasn't popular or smart or talented enough to hang out with. Getting to have dinner with them on a quasi-regular basis has shown me that they really ARE as interesting and creative and smart and funny and hardworking as my self-loathing teenage self had considered them to be. They're even more so now. 

We're in such very different lanes of life now and I value their friendship even more because of it, they offer me perspectives that are so far outside my normal social sphere, they share their vastly differently lives with me and enrich my own with their experiences. And at the same time, we DO have overlaps in our worlds, our careers, our relationships. C, S, N and I work in completely unrelated fields but we all are small business owners so we can relate on that front. E and B are both mothers to two children each. C, S, E, and I work in the "creative industry", though in very different corners of it. B and N work in the health field, though, again, in very, very different aspects of it. B, E, and I are married, while both S and N have just come out of serious, long-term relationships and are starting to date again. We overlap in some ways and we don't in others and between us all we share our hearts and our humanity with each other. 

Anyway, all of this to say: we're doing a Secret Santa with each other and I made this for mine. 

See, her last name is Fitchen and she just moved into a new house, one that comes with a kitchen, so obviously it's the Bitchin' Fitchen Kitchen U_U

First I mocked it up in Photoshop. Those numbers on the bottom left are the DMC color codes for the floss I would use. 

Then I traced it onto fabric with a water soluble pen. 

Haha I still suck at sewing on that finishing backing thing LOL

Hope she likes it!