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A Look at Common Cross Stitch Mistakes

April 8, 2025 by Sarah White

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]

Next Pattern:

  • How to Railroad Your Cross Stitch
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Have you read?

A Cross Stitch I Spy at the Beach

That headline pretty much describes the Under the Sea cross stitch pattern from Una Buena Pieza, which is covered with shells, fish and other creatures of the sea. It’s not intended to be an I spy, I don’t think, and most of the same kinds of animals are grouped together, but I think it would be fun for someone who didn’t stitch it to look and see what different things they can find within.

The pattern includes turtles, jellyfish, a whale, shark, ray, all sorts of fish and shells and I’m sure other things that I’m not noticing right now. Dolphins! Coral! Seagulls!

It looks like it would be super fun to stitch and fun to have on the wall during the summer months, or even hang in a kid’s room if you know a young one who loves the beach or ocean animals.

The design is 110 by 220 stitches. It comes out to about 8 by 16 inches, or 20 by 40 cm, when stitched on 14 count fabric. It calls for 19 colors.

This design looks great on light blue fabric as shown, but in the pattern listing on Etsy you’ll also see what it looks like on a darker blue and a white fabric, and they all look pretty good so you can use whatever color you like to suit your decor or your idea of what color the “ocean” should be. There’s even a customer photo that looks like it was done on a sort of tie-dyed green fabricc, which is really fun.

However you stitch it, I think this project would go faster than you imagine because there are so many fun little things to stitch. It will be hard to get bored when you can just move on to a different animal or part of the design.

Check out this pattern from Una Buena Pieza on Etsy.

[Photo: Una Buena Pieza]

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