Porte-aiguilles Black Work Project – Needle Book

I’ve recently been doing more embroidery than usual, and while I do tend to be rather intuitive when I stitch rather than planning it out too much or caring if all the stitches are perfect, there was a particular section that I felt the need to rip out. Twice.

In cross stitch as well as embroidery, there may come a time when you need to rip out a few stitches or a big section of a project. Maybe you put a stitch or a few where they didn’t belong, used the wrong color or just didn’t like the look of something once it was on the fabric.

What’s the best way to work back in cross stitch? As with most things, the answer is it depends.

But for a look at your options, I don’t think I’ve seen a better rundown than this post from Sirious Stitches. There’s a video in the post if you don’t want to read it all, but either way there are some great ideas and things to think about when you need to rip out stitches.

I think we’ve all stitched backwards from time to time when we put a stitch or two in the wrong place, but it’s helpful to know what the best solution is when you’ve got more ground to cover. Or uncover, in this case.

Personally I was a little afraid to use a seam ripper but I’m glad to see that’s a valid option if you’re careful.

The post also has good tips for cleaning up your project after you rip things out, since you might have some stray thread tails of fuzzy bits that need to be dealt with before you get back to stitching.

There’s lots of great stuff in there worth reading before you need it and keeping handy in case you need to remove a bunch of stitches from a project.

Have you ever ripped out a lot of cross stitch? I’d love to hear how you went about it.

[Photo: Sirious Stitches]