About the Author

Brenda Gerace has been working with cross stitch and plastic canvas for decades now and has a vast collection of patterns and magazines on needlecraft. She has created hundreds of items for herself, her family and friends. Many of those family and friends are scattered all throughout the United States. Chuck Michels has a past that includes various crafts but most of his experience is in the business management and computer fields. They met in early 2007 and began a relationship filled with love, caring and crafting together. While organizing the hundreds of books and magazines Brenda had accumulated over the years they noticed some of Brenda's patterns were damaged or pages were misplaced and a need was created for them to make replacements for these patterns. While replacing these old patterns we found other new images they thought would make great cross stitch designs and created patterns for them as well. Going through these older patterns and magazines we found several plastic canvas patterns for banks, calendars and various other items that she had not used for several years. Brenda began working on making a Buffalo Bills Forever Calendar for a friend and banks out of plastic canvas for her twelve grandchildren. Many of her friends and family wanted to see pictures of these items but it became a pain to constantly attach pictures to text messages on her cell phone, so we created the Facebook group "Brenda's Craft Shop". After posting pictures on the site she began to get flooded with orders for various plastic canvas calendars and banks. Brenda now works almost exclusively on plastic canvas and the large collection of cross stitch patterns we created were going unused. Chuck was already researching the possibility of writing and self publishing a book. Instead of letting this collection of cross stitch patterns, and all the time and hard work we put into them, go to waste we decided to publish the patterns and share them with crafty people like you.