Designer Spotlight: Counting Puddles

Counting Puddles is an Etsy shop that doesn’t have a huge selection of cross stitch patterns, but it does have some printables that might be relevant at the time of year that I am writing this.

Most of the patterns you’ll find in the shop are seasonal, with a couple of space-themed ones thrown in.

I of course love this Books are Magic design, which includes books, flowers, a butterfly, moon and stars worked in back stitch. There are lots of techniques here including cross stitches, back and straight stitches, French knots and star stitches, which give it a lovely, textured look. The design is 114 by 140 stitches, which comes out to 7.1 by 8.8 inches, or 18 by 22 cm, on 32 count linen stitched over 2.

Many of their patterns combine cross stitch with techniques that might be considered more embroidery, which is a fun way both to learn some different techniques and to give your project a different look than straight cross stitching gives you.

As I mentioned, in addition to patterns, the shop offers a couple of good looking printables if doing more cross stitch and being better organized are among your new year’s resolutions. There’s a cross stitch tracker printable to help encourage you to stitch a little every day and a project tracker that’s set up with 12 projects on a progress wheel with another page for notes with more details about what each project is and when you started and finished them.

The tracker has am x (like a cross stitch, of course!) for each day so you can color it in when you do stitching. It’s important when forming or reinforcing a habit to not break the chain and this gives you a visual reminder of that.

Check out all their designs at the Counting Puddles Etsy shop. If you try out their printables, or you have another way of keeping your cross stitch goals on track, I’d love to hear about it.

[Photo: Countin Puddles]

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How to Make French Knots

I love the look of variegated cross stitch floss and how it makes it possible to stitch with a variety of colors without changing thread, giving your project more depth and a more complex look without you having to do anything different.

Or at least not much different. I recently came across this blog post from The Copper Fox all about how to use variegated floss and it noted that many people would say it’s a good idea to complete a whole stitch (when you’re stitching whole cross stitches) with the floss before going on to the next stitch. Most of us stitch row by row, but of course if you do that with variegated yarn, it could change color along the way and you’ll end up with stitches that are half one color and half another color or a different shade.

Of course that makes total sense but I’d never thought about it.

The post includes swatches with different kinds of variegated threads to show the different between working stitch by stitch or row by row, and it doesn’t make a huge different over the small area shown but I can see how it might make a difference if you had really long rows or if you just want to make sure your stitches are a single color whenever possible.

In addition to this experiment, the post talks about other ways to work with multicolored floss, including deliberately mixing the colors among the strands of floss you are stitching with and stitching in a different order instead of right to left and top to bottom (or whatever direction you typically work) to get different effects from the thread.

It’s fun to geek out on this stuff because it can make a difference if you want to play with it, or you can just stitch on without giving it much thought, and both will give you good results.

Check out all the experiments at The Copper Fox.

Do you do anything different when you stitch with variegated floss? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo: The Copper Fox]

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