A bit of history
I was born in Rotterdam (the Netherlands) on the 3rd of December 1969. Two-and-a-half years later my brother Peter was born. When I was 9 years old, we moved to a town in the east of the Netherlands at 5 kilometers of the German border, called Hardenberg. At my new school all girls had one hour a week of needlecrafts (how old-fashioned!), and the first thing I had to make was a pillow in cross stitch. As I started at this school in October, all other girls had already been working on their pillows for quite a few weeks, and I had to make up for lost time taking work home with me. Even so, I was still behind and there were not enough threads to finish my pillow in the correct colours. According to my mom, I was so obsessed with the pillow that I once even sleepwalked into my parents' room asking for green threads! Anyway, this quite disastrous experience was not a very good way to start a love of cross stitching. However, I did love needlecrafts, as I always saw my mother knitting and sewing and so these were the crafts I practiced for a long time.
In 1987 I finished secondary school and went to London for a year to work as an au-pair. The next year I started university in Utrecht where I studied English language and literature, and the year after I also started Spanish. In 1992 I went to Granada (Spain) for 6 months with the Erasmus exchange programme. And there I met Manolo, my husband. When the 6 months were over, I went back to the Netherlands to finish my studies and in October 1993 I moved to Spain, where I still live.
In Spain the need for knitted sweaters is a lot less than in the Netherlands, so I wanted to start another needlecraft. My mother had started stitching a flora-and-fauna ABC, which she couldn't finish because of wrist problems, and I offered to finish it for her. And that's how my love for cross stitching started.
Apart from cross stitching, there are many other things I like to do, so I'm a very lucky person, as I'm never bored. I love reading, my favourite authors are John Irving, Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez and Thomas Hardy. I also love sports, my favourite sport is tennis, which I started after having played squash for quite some time. But I also enjoy walking, swimming and cycling. Another thing I love to do is going to the cinema. In Almería the number of cinemas has been growing from only 5 screens in 1993 to 33 at the moment, so there's quite a lot to choose from. And then most of all, I love travelling, but unfortunately that's not something you can do every day! Luckily there are several good travel magazines, in order to travel at least in one's imagination!
