A New Skill for the New Year: Embroidering Your Handwriting

We often want to add letters to our cross stitch projects, whether to add a word or a date or a person’s initials. But it’s not always easy to find cross stitch fonts you like that will fit into the space you need in your design.

One easy way around that is to use your own handwriting to fill in the words with embroidery.

The Craftsy blog has to how-to, plus all the different things you need to think about before you add handwriting to a project. It also shows samples of many different stitch techniques used in lettering so you can get the look you want without doing a ton of experiments.

Have you ever added embroidery to a cross-stitch or other project? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo: Craftsy.]

Looking for more fonts? Check these out at Fontbundles.com

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Find the Right Font for Your Cross Stitch Project

One of the most common problems that cross stitchers at all skill levels have is that the cross stitch fabric can start fraying while you stitch.

Beginner cross stitchers might wonder why this happens and if there is something they are doing wrong to cause it.

The reason cross stitch fabric frays is because it is a woven fabric, and the nature of any kind of woven fabric (whether that’s cross stitch fabric, a torn up towel or a piece of fabric you’re going to sew) is that it wants to fray.

It’s not necessarily a huge deal if you cross stitch fabric starts fraying mid-project if you have left a lot of extra fabric around your stitching. But if there’s not much fabric to spare in order to be able to finish the project the way you want, you’ll want to do something to stop the fraying.

When I was growing up I remember my mom using masking tape for this purpose, but it turns out there are lots of different things that you can do to stop your cross stitch fabric from fraying.

Craft with Cartwright came up with 15 different things that you can try, which seems like a lot, but that just means you have lots of different things you can try.

If you don’t want to buy something, you can stitch along the edges. If you already have supplies like tape or glue, or access to pinking shears or a serger, there are lots of options you can try.

Some of these are more permanent than others, so it will depend a little bit on how you want to finish your cross stitch project as to which is the best choice for you. It’s a great idea to read through the whole list just so you can have them in the back of yoru mind the next time you start a project and think about how you would like to protect it.

You can find the whole list at Craft with Cartwright.

How do you like to stop fraying on your cross stitch projects? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

[Photo: Craft with Cartwright]

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