Like Bob Ross said, as an approximation, it's your happy little world, put it where you want it.
I love everyone's crafts! I've painted a picture once, where you bring your own wine and a group of people are instructed through painting a pic. To give you an idea of the extent of my apparent talent in that area, I prefer my pic upside-down. LMBO!!
I have always been very into cross-stitch. It's a very inexpensive hobby once you have amassed a good collection of thread colors, can be done literally anywhere, and takes up very little storage space. Then it's just buying the fabric & framing. My husband has made a lot of frames for me with scrap wood from his work, so those were free.
I've stitched MANY things from existing patters, and in the past couple decades, I have made and stitched a lot of my own designs. I use a lot of different stitches from embroidery, not just X's and outlines. I've usually used graph paper.
And I have used spreadsheets several times more recently.
More from my bottle and vase phase:
This has beads.
I made this by copying the pattern on a pair of socks.
This has a bunch of toy items, some borrowed elements and some of my own, arranged as if on shelves in a child's room.
The basics of this were found in a pattern book, and then I added many additional layers of embellishment.
I liked it so much, I made another variation.
This is a homage to Escher. I made this about 40 yrs ago.
Some of the most fun things to stitch only take a few hours.
And sometimes you see a pattern that you're willing to spend months to stitch. There was another child on the rug but by the time I got down there, I just wanted to finish it.
I borrowed the train, bear head, and horse, and sketched the cars on graph paper. In retrospect, the scale is way off, and there is too much space between P and Q. Clearly the world's biggest animals. LOL!
Wish I had a pic of everything I've stitched over the years. Almost all of the pieces were given as gifts. I don't regret any but would just like to have a pic to remember each one.