Give Your Cross Stitch People the Right Skin Tone

One of the popular genres of cross stitching these days is cross stitching family portraits, or self-portraits, or cross stitched versions of famous people or made up people or any combination of the above.

There are whole books and websites dedicated to helping people develop patterns for these kinds of projects or even to make them totally on their own. See for example the Do It Yourself Stitch People book as well as Customize Your Cross Stitch: Friends and Family.

These resources are great and offer lots of options to help you make stitched family portraits that actually look like the people (and pets!) in your family or friend group, or like your favorite famous people.

Whether you are using a book or website to help you or going it alone on your designs, one of the hardest things can be choosing the right floss for a person’s skin color. Of course this comes up with any people stitched in your projects, regardless of if they are meant to look like you or someone you know.

It’s easy to end up with a face that’s too pink or too dark, or with highlights or shadows that just look weird.

That’s where this awesome chart from Lord Libidan comes in. It includes a bunch of different sets of shades for skin tones, getting progressively darker across the chart. Each selection includes a skintone, highlight and shadow, so you can combine them to make a face that looks natural. If the people in your design have different skin tones, you can also pick one to use as your baseline and then select darker or lighter colors for the other faces as needed.

This is only a little bit of the chart shown above, so click over to Lord Libidan’s website to check out the whole range of skin tones matched with DMC colors.

[Photo: Lord Libidan]

Book Review: Customize Your Cross Stitch

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Book Review: Customize Your Cross Stitch

I’ll admit to not taking as much care as I should when finishing cross stitch projects. Just like blocking in knitting or crochet, taking the time to finish a cross stitch project right means it will look its best, whether you’re making it as a gift or to keep.

And when it comes to cross stitch, the best method for finishing is washing and pressing.

Kat and Catkin and Lillie makes the argument that you should always press your finished pieces, and wash them the vast majority of the time as well.

Washing of course will help if there is any visible dirt that got on the project while stitching, but it also helps remove oils and skin cells you can’t see but that can speed up damage to your project in the long run.

Washing and pressing also help remove creases from the hoop or from storing the project, and if you use heat-erasable marking pens to grid your fabric, this will remove any visible marks.

So we’ve got the why down, but what about the how?

Kat has a great step by step tutorial on how to wash your cross stitch projects and how to iron them safely. You probably have everything you need to do this, it just takes a bit of time to go through the process. It’s certainly worth it, though, if you’ve spent a lot of time on a project and are gifting it or framing it and want to show it off to its best.

Click over to the post at Catkin and Lillie for all the details, plus some really good thoughts on times when you might not want to wash a project and how to test the colorfastness of your threads so you’ll know if a project is safe to wash.

Do you wash and press your finished cross stitch projects? I’d love to hear all about your process!

[Photo: Catkin and Lillie]

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