A Look at Common Cross Stitch Mistakes

When you’re new to a craft, you don’t know what you don’t know. It always surprises me the really basic questions that people ask in knitting and crochet Facebook groups that I’m in, things you’d think “everyone” knows like the difference between different needle sizes and yarn weights, but if you’ve never done that craft before, it makes sense you wouldn’t know things more seasoned people consider basic.

It’s the same with cross stitch. There are lots of easy cross stitch mistakes you might be making as a new stitcher (or even when you have more experience) that can affect your work.

For example, fabric size. I went years not knowing there were different counts of cross stitch fabric, and since most projects are worked on 14 count and that’s what’s most commonly sold, too, I never had a problem. But if your pattern calls for a particular size of fabric and you use something else, your project will come out a different size than expected, which could be a problem.

That’s just one of the common cross stitch mistakes you’ll find explored in this blog post from Crewel Ghoul. The others are maybe not quite as basic and they’re things that sometimes might turn out OK but other times can cause a big mess that you might not know how to fix if you’re new to cross stitching.

Even if you’re more experienced you might want to click over and read her tips so you can make sure you are doing the best you can to make sure your cross stitch project turns out great.

One thing that’s not on the list that I’m sometimes still guilty of is not making all the stitches in the same order so the project ends up looking like it has stripes! What beginner mistakes did you make that you’ve since learned to do better (even if you don’t always do better)?

[Photo: Crewel Ghoul]

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35+ Sunflower Cross Stitch Patterns

It’s back to school time where I live, which I always feel like is a great time to learn a new skill or take a deeper dive into something that you might not have learned a lot about before.

Usually when we are learning new hobbies we only know what we know. We learn the terms that we encounter, the skills that come up in the projects that we want to make. It’s not that we don’t care about other basics or different approaches, we just learn what we need to know to make what we want to make.

And that’s totally fine, but sometimes it’s a good idea to go back and review the basics or learn the things you might have missed the first time.

In that spirit I share this post from Caterpillar Cross Stitch all about basic cross stitch terms that every stitcher ought to know.

Did you know that the little bundle of thread you use for cross stitch is called a skein, for example? Or the difference between grid size and design area in a pattern? Or that working complete stitches one at a time is known as the English method? (I didn’t know that one! Apparently doing half of the stitch across the row and then coming back and finishing it is the Danish method. Who knew?)

There’s also a little bit about getting started with confidence that might be helpful at any skill level.

So what I’m saying is, even if you feel like you know a lot about cross stitch already, head over to Caterpillar Cross Stitch and check out their list of terms and make sure you know them all. If nothing else you’ll feel a little smarter, either because you already knew them all or you learned something new!

And if you do learn something new, I’d love to hear about it.

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