Designer Spotlight: Terezy Stitch

Terezy Stitch is a Polish Esty shop with a bit of a witchy vibe where you’ll find cross stitch patterns on all sorts of subjects, with an emphasis on flowers, landscapes, cats and holiday patterns.

It’s not necessarily representative of all the projects you’ll find there (though there are other insects done in the same style), but as soon as I saw this pattern for a golden dragonfly I knew it was the one I needed to share. This one is 176 by 174 stitches, which comes out to 12.6 by 12.4 inches, or 31.9 by 31.6 cm on 14 count fabric.

It uses 15 colors, and I love it on the black fabric but it would be pretty on any shade of blue as well.

The biggest category in the shop is floral cross stitch, and here you’ll find realistic looking designs of flowers, succulents and mushrooms as well as more graphic or abstract approaches. I love this window of succulents!

There are also a lot of landscape cross stitch patterns, heavy on mountains and water but also things like a lavender field with a windmill and a fantasy castle on a cliff side.

The Christmas patterns include a lot of houses, and there are lots of cute cat cross stitch patterns, from cartoonish to geometric to folk art styles.

This store also includes a good number of blackwork designs, which is not something you see everywhere. Most of them are bookmarks, and a lot of those are zodiac sign bookmarks, but that’s a great way to try out blackwork on a small scale and see if you like it before buying a bigger pattern. (Blackwork for the most part is done with back stitching, but it’s considered a form of cross stitch because it’s worked on cross stitch fabric.)

Check out everything this shop has to offer at Terezy Stitch on Etsy. If you see something you like, I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo: Terezy Stitch]

Long ago when I was in 4-H, the club made a quilt for our leader when she was having a baby. It was made of green and white blocks and some of the white blocks had four-leaf clovers cross stitched on them.

That’s the one and only time I remember using waste canvas to cross stitch on fabric, but I think about it a lot when I consider stitching on other fabrics that don’t have built in blocks.

Using waste canvas allows you to superimpose a grid onto fabric so you can follow a cross stitch pattern and stitch on the fabric, then remove the waste fabric, leaving just the original fabric and the stitching behind.

It’s relatively easy to use, but it’s great to have a tutorial and some tips to work from the first time you do it. I think we were just winging it honestly but it turned out fine in the end.

There’s a great post with lots of photos over at Koekoek that shows you how to set yourself up for waste canvas stitching success, how to actually do the stitching and how to remove the waste canvas. They call that part fun but I don’t agree as far as I can remember. I think the tediousness of pulling out the waste canvas threads is a big part of what has kept me from getting more and using it in different projects.

I’d love to add a bit of cross stitch to some clothing, or to a piece of fabric to then sew into a pillow or another project. (They show a pillow in the blog post, but you could also do this to make cloth napkins, a tablecloth or any number of other projects.) Maybe reading all about it will motivate me to give it another try!

Have you ever worked with waste canvas? I’d love to know how it went.

[Photo: Koekoek]

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