kate_nepveu | cross-stitching 101

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.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

kate_nepveu

Thanks for the link. Ugh, there's an actual needlework shop about half an hour away from Chad's parents, one of these days when we're visiting I'll go down . . .

From:

mme_hardy

I was thinking of doing a sub-post of stuff I can't live without.

Thread Heaven. All hail Thread Heaven. http://www.threadheaven.com/

Q-Snaps hoops. Circular hoops stretch fabric on the bias; Q-snaps preserve the grain of the fabric. They're also comfortable to hold. http://www.qsnap.com/

Sharp scissors. I love my Gingher embroidery scissors, but if I didn't already have a pair, I'd go for Havel's, which have excellent quality. http://www.havelssewing.com/

Some way to organize the thread; everybody's got their favorite. I tend to just grab a piece of cardboard, write thread numbers, and make slits in the cardboard to hold each bunch of thread of the same color.

I like this sort of needle threader: http://www.123stitch.com/item/Dritz-Tapestry-Needle-Threaders/123-10500 Much, much less fiddly than the wire ones, and less likely to cause twisting.

I keep my current project and its associated tools in a quart or gallon-sized Zip-Loc.

From:

kate_nepveu

Thread Heaven, yes.

I like Q-Snaps, though I am currently experimenting with stitching in the hand.

For floss, I use snack-sized ziploc bags with a hole-punched index card inside: hole-punch the bag to match, and then you can string the bags on one or two rings or put them in a little binder, and when not being used for a project, the card means they stand up easily(-ish) in a file box.

I should've ironed my current project before I started stitching, but I made some tubes out of cardstock to wrap it around and then tuck inside, so I wouldn't have to fold it, which amuses me inordinately. That goes in a big ziploc bag. Little scissors, needles, Thread Heaven, etc., go in a change purse. Pattern, highlighters, pencil are the rest, and it all gets tossed in a super-cheap canvas tote bag (one of these, undecorated) so I have handles.

From:

mme_hardy

How did you hold the ends of the fabric to the tubes?

From:

kate_nepveu

Narrower tube, fabric gets wrapped around; pop both inside wider (maybe not actually necessary), then pop wider tube inside ziploc bag, where it just fits, so nothing goes sliding out. If I'd needed to I could've taped another bit of cardstock to the bottom of the wide tube, though.

From:

mme_hardy

God, you've infected me. I used to be an ardent cross-stitcher, but then my eyes went and I couldn't wear glasses because of the migraines. Now I've found some superlightweight glasses, I should dig out some of my old projects.

From:

kate_nepveu

I hope that you are able to stitch again without migraines! That would be awesome.

From:

thistleingrey

Out of curiosity, do you or would you also use Q-Snaps for larger projects beyond 20" on one side? How bad is it to move them around the way one might move a hoop?

I've discovered that I can address a 4" square with an awake child (who now finds it diverting to help me separate cotton strands when asked and understands about not tangling them unnecessarily), so I'm trying slowly to figure out how I could do my languishing Wentzler kit without my old wooden tabletop frame (no longer usable for me). I'm willing to buy stuff--a design that's 22.5 x 14.5" is worth some care--but have little sense of where to look for recs/suggestions at this point.

From:

kate_nepveu

I think if you stitched "in the well" [*] with Q-Snaps, then putting the pieces over finished stitching wouldn't be too bad.

Googling turns up this: http://www.crossstitchforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=21809 in which people recommend that, or putting a bit of protecting fabric between, or just not bothering with anything at all. I think I'd not be comfortable with "nothing at all," because I often struggled a bit to get the clamp pieces off.

[*] Fabric front-up on bottom, full frame on top, clamp pieces attaching from the bottom of everything. It doesn't let the excess fabric flow over the sides quite as neatly, probably, but likely it's still workable.

I'm still working on the small project in the hand, so I haven't tried it. Offer to loan you my Q-Snaps still stands--I'm totally in love with stitching in the hand and the next thing is going to be trying to finish the big WiP that way.

From:

thistleingrey

Thanks muchly for the input as well as the link. (I too would put something between fabric and plastic/wood, I think.) Perhaps I'll try it in the hand after this small piece is finished and see how it goes. I am a little afraid of 25ct evenweave.

From:

kate_nepveu

The evenweave part or the 25ct part? At least it's bigger than 28ct, which is what I default to these days?

From:

thistleingrey

The 25ct part. 28ct slides into "makes my eyes go funny" territory. (On one hand, glad it's mostly mild astigmatism--both my closest friends from school have been legally blind from myopia since our teens--but on another, resentful that that astigmatism flickers as my neck joints shift and thus is never quiiiiite corrected by my glasses. Really small in the grand scheme, and yet.)

From:

mme_hardy

I don't get around much, so I consider a couple of mail-order places to be my Local Needlework Shop. Mine are Nordic Needle, which helped introduce Hardanger to America: http://www.nordicneedle.com/ and Needle in a Haystack, in Berkeley. http://www.needlestack.com/ For historic sewing supplies (silver spangles, that sort of thing) I love Hedgehog Handworks. http://www.hedgehoghandworks.com/catalog/index.php

God. I have strong opinions, don't I?