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]

One of the easiest ways to make a cross stitch project more personal is to add text to it. Whether you’re adding the names of people getting married to a generic floral cross stitch design, birth information to a project on theme with the new baby’s room or just adding a word or phrase that’s meaningful to you, adding words to cross stitch projects make them that much more special.

But if you’re not working with a project that already has text built in, or you want to change the text that’s there, that can feel a little daunting.

Caterpillar Cross Stitch has a great guide to adding names and words (as well as numbers) to projects, which talks you through what to consider and how to actually go about adding text to a cross stitch project successfully.

You’ll need to think about what kind of font you want to use and if you’re using back stitched letters or larger filled letters, how much space you need and how the letters work together in the text you’re planning to make sure it’s readable.

Their post includes common pitfalls such as running out a space or ending up with text that’s off center and how to avoid them (spoiler: chart out your text before you stitch!).

The whole post is really helpful if you’ve never added lettering to a project before and don’t know where to start. I like to use block letters in back stitch when learning how to add text to cross stitch, but of course there are tons of lettering options. Check out this collection of cross stitch fonts if you want to see some different things you can try.

And head over to Caterpillar Cross Stitch to get more tips for how to successfully add lettering to your cross stitch projects. They also have their own alphabet and number charts you can buy to add text to your stitching.

Have you ever added text to a cross stitch project? I’d love to hear how it went!

[Photo: Caterpillar Cross Stitch]

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