Cross-Stitch

Charts, patterns and everything needlepoint

Egyptian Cross-Stitch

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Hannah submitted this post and wow am I glad she shared her link! She writes in her blog that her friend send this bag to her from Egypt. She says, “The tag says it’s from a fair trade association for selling handicrafts, and this one was made by a group of North Sinai Bedouin women. The tag says “Each design and color combination holds social and/or cultural meaning” but totally fails to say what meaning that is. Just enough information to be frustratingly vague. … It does mention that the design is inspired by patterns used to decorate traditional Bedouin wedding galabeyas (a special type of traditional dress).”

I hope Hannah will keep us updated if she finds out more about the bag!

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Comments

  1. I am Egyptian and want to share with you some info about North Sinai cross stitching :
    ” Bedouin women are keen to show their social situation statues by the colors used in the embroidery and garment they wear. For example dress embroidered in blue worn by an old lady, or a divorced.The married woman dress is embroidered in red, while the little girl wears dresses embroidered in light colors”. Also every tribe can be known by its own stitching type on dresses.”

Have you read?

How to Stitch with Variegated Floss

I love the look of variegated cross stitch floss and how it makes it possible to stitch with a variety of colors without changing thread, giving your project more depth and a more complex look without you having to do anything different.

Or at least not much different. I recently came across this blog post from The Copper Fox all about how to use variegated floss and it noted that many people would say it’s a good idea to complete a whole stitch (when you’re stitching whole cross stitches) with the floss before going on to the next stitch. Most of us stitch row by row, but of course if you do that with variegated yarn, it could change color along the way and you’ll end up with stitches that are half one color and half another color or a different shade.

Of course that makes total sense but I’d never thought about it.

The post includes swatches with different kinds of variegated threads to show the different between working stitch by stitch or row by row, and it doesn’t make a huge different over the small area shown but I can see how it might make a difference if you had really long rows or if you just want to make sure your stitches are a single color whenever possible.

In addition to this experiment, the post talks about other ways to work with multicolored floss, including deliberately mixing the colors among the strands of floss you are stitching with and stitching in a different order instead of right to left and top to bottom (or whatever direction you typically work) to get different effects from the thread.

It’s fun to geek out on this stuff because it can make a difference if you want to play with it, or you can just stitch on without giving it much thought, and both will give you good results.

Check out all the experiments at The Copper Fox.

Do you do anything different when you stitch with variegated floss? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo: The Copper Fox]