cross-stitching 101

[kate_nepveu]

Revised from a comment I posted a while ago (in the last thread on the first page of comments here), prompted by tomorrow's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell post (no, really! Cross-stitching, slash, and a man wearing a ship on his head, all coming to a Tor.com near you.). Someone asked if I'd taught myself to cross-stitch, and I said I had when I was a kid: "Pretty much your threshold for 'looks good!' is 'all stitches go in the same direction' and 'no big lumpy knots on the back,' so it's pretty simple. => There are bunches of tips for making it look _great_ to close inspection, but start with the basics and see if you like it."

Here are the basics that I came up with on the fly, slightly cleaned up.

You can either find a pattern you like and get the cloth and thread you need for it, or you can buy it all together in a kit. (These days kits are harder to find in general craft stores.) There are also two kinds of kits, the kind with blank fabric and a chart ("counted cross stitch") and the kind with the picture printed on the fabric that you stitch over ("stamped cross stitch").

If you're assembling stuff to make a pattern you've found, I'd recommend starting with Aida fabric, because it's simpler. You want a tapestry needle, because it's blunt; if you're using the most common Aida size, which is 14, try size 24 or 26. And you want embroidery floss, the kind that comes with six plies or strands (for stitching on 14 Aida, you'll want two of those strands); DMC is the biggest name here, and Anchor is also a big name in the UK.

You'll probably also find it easiest, to start, to have a hoop or frame to hold the fabric. A kit may come with a hoop, and hoops are generally the easiest to find in general craft stores. (There are lots more options, but: basics.)

The actual stitching is super simple. Aida fabric is all nice neat little squares with holes at each corner. Push your needle up through a hole from the back, then bring it down through the hole that's diagonal from the one you started with, making the bottom part of the X. If you think of your square's corners numbered like below, you could, for instance, come up at 3 and come down at 2:

12
34

If you're doing a row of stitches, it's easier and faster to do all the bottom parts first. So bring your needle up at 4--it's part of the same block--and then make another diagonal stitch, until you're done that row in your pattern:

/ / / / /

ETA: when you're starting off, leave an inch or two of thread on the back side of your fabric, when you pull it through from 3. Then, when you go down at 2 and up and 4, you'll make a straight line down on the back: before you pull it taut, tuck the inch or two of thread through it, so it's trapped underneath when you pull the stitch taut. You can then do the same thing for the rest of the row, and you've safely secured the start of your thread without a lumpy knot. When you get to the end of your thread, use your needle to run it through a row of stitches on the back for the same effect. Here are some pictures I found on a super-quick search.

At the end of the row, come up again at 4 but this time cross the stitch by making a diagonal in the opposite direction (go down at 1), then repeat:

\ \ \ \ \

Et voila! You now have, err, five neat little X's of thread. (You can stitch in whatever direction you want, as long as it's always the same; I just used that example because it's how I do it and made it less likely I'd mis-state something accidentally.)

Here are some things that affect a project's complexity and difficulty, which you may want to consider when picking something to try--you know your own tolerance for diving in the deep end!

• size
• number of colors
• whether those colors are mostly in their own areas (easier) or whether they are all mixed up (harder)
• besides cross-stitch and backstitch (used to outline: it's the brown in the polar bears), does it look like it uses any other stitches? beads?
• ETA: metallic threads (high difficulty level)

There are lots of tutorials and things online, but they seemed to have pretty wildly varying levels of information, so I figured I'd make my own attempt at what I thought the real basics were.

Questions? Disagreements? Demand for a 201+ discussion? (I was planning to save that until my next finish, or at least until I need advice on it, honestly, but we can set up a dedicated comment thread here if you all want.)

Comments

[ceb]

A small amount of regionalisation: at least in the UK, Anchor is also a big, reliable floss manufacturer (DMC and Anchor are the big two). Also 'kitty-corner' means nothing to me as a British English speaker (I would say 'diagonally across from').

When you're talking about own areas vs mixed up, I would emphasise that patterns with just a cross or two on their own here and there are really very awkward, much more than you might expect if you've never tried cross-stitch before.

Maybe add something about how to start and stop stitching? I think that's the only thing that strikes me as missing from this, it's a really nice intro otherwise :-)

[yhlee]

Thank you for this!

I actually used to stitch one X at a time, rather than //// then \\\\, until someone told me I was doing it wrong. (It's curious that my mother didn't correct me, but now that I think of it, cross-stitch is one of the few fabric arts she didn't do or did very seldom.)

I would love to see a 201 discussion. Especially on using beads. I have seen gorgeous-looking kits but am not sure I am up to something as fiddly as beads. (I used to do a little bead-weaving and then regular old beading on tiger-tail, but my coordination is even worse now than it used to be.)

(Also, am longing to do bookmarks, but it's going to be hard to eke out time for even that until December, the way this month has been going. But, bookmarks! :D )

Other 101 stuff

[mme_hardy]

Don't pull the thread tight. This is easy to do because your hands tense up, but it makes your life more difficult if you have to (gulp) unpick, and can even deform the fabric. Snug is good, taut is bad.

Some people prefer to work with the fabric held loosely in the non-working hand. Some people prefer hoops. Try both, and see which works for you. Cheap wooden hoops will make you cry; get the cheap plastic ones instead.

You *will* have to unpick work, and that's just part of the gig, just as unravelling is for knitting and crochet.

If you're working from a chart, photocopy it. Every time you finish a row, draw a line through it on the photocopy. Makes navigation way, way easier. (If you prefer to highlight a row, that's fine, too.)

Start from the center. This will help keep you from wandering off the edge of your fabric. The pattern will usually have the center marked. Find the center of your fabric by folding it in quarters.

Blunt scissors will also make you cry. Fiskars are often cheap and sharp.

Oh! Everybody will tell you to do this, but you'll skip it because it's boring. Don't skip it. When you cut the floss, separate *each individual thread* from the other. Then lay the threads back on top of each other: two threads, three, four, whatever. Separating the threads in the floss completely, then reassembling them really cuts down on the tangling.

[rushthatspeaks]

The 101 tip which would have saved me the most time as a tween:

the inclusion of metallic thread in a pattern ups the difficulty exponentially. Metallics are terrible to work with and require experience and confidence. I usually put them in after the rest of the pattern is already finished.

[quinfirefrorefiddle]

I'm much more of a freehand embroidery kind of person, but a couple things I would say is that I was taught to start a pattern by working the lightest color first, then the next lightest and so on to the darkest. The reason for this is when you're working the darker threads you'll be able to tell if you can see a thread, say, jumping behind the fabric from one spot to another, through the fabric. Black outlines and french knots come last. (Find a vid to watch to learn how to do french knots, half the pictures I've seen are just wrong.)

You can tell an experienced stitcher from an inexperienced by the back of their project, not the front- the more practiced you get, the neater and cleaner the back will be.

Also, regarding tangling, some people see it as cheating but you can get nice little resin-applicators for very cheap to run the thread through, and then it won't tangle and breaks less. And if you want to take a project on a plane, get one of those necklace cutters, a pendant with the sharp parts on the inside edge, also very cheap and not a weapon.

[saoba]

Fray-check, or whatever the kids are using these days to keep the fabric edges from going to bits, would go on my materials list. When photocopying charts, don't hesitate to blow them up, some companies make the charts rawther small. Two paper clips and a sheet of blank paper can be laid over a chart to keep your place, just move it down line by line as you go.

Years ago I took myself for an eye exam. When asked why I was there that day I explained my near vision seemed to be going downhill. Doctor nodded, asked my age (32), asked what age my mother and grandmothers went into glasses (late 40s all around). Doctor asked what count fabric I was stitching.

I had not mentioned cross stitch and pointed that out. Doctor gave me a grin and said that the upsurge in counted cross stitch was bring in women for vision correction 10-15 years before their family history might suggest. He thought that close, fine hand work was making women more aware of changes in their vision.

I said "Huh. 28 count, mostly." Doctor nodded and looked pleased with himself.

[readingtheend.pip.verisignlabs.com]

Where to get patterns from: Etsy is an excellent source! Last year I acquired a cross-stitch pattern from Etsy for cross-stitch Avengers, which I made into a pillow for my brother-in-law. Maybe $4 for the pattern?

Also, my public library has a service called Zinio by which I have access to a delightful ?British? cross-stitching magazine called Cross-Stitcher, and they have a whole bunch of patterns every month.

I made a cross-stitch bib for my godmother's son when I was eight years old and have been cross-stitching ever since. It is wonderfully soothing. Trichotillomania runs in my family, and I like to think that cross-stitching is scratching that itch for me. :p