Giving Thanks – Cross-Stitch

Today at my house, we celebrate Thanksgiving. I am thankful for friends, family, a warm home, and so much more. My thoughts inevitably turn to cross-stitch since that is how I spend much of my time. So I thought I’d share my Thanksgiving Cross Stitch Thoughts with you today.

I am thankful for:

Flosses – there’s so much variety!
Tapestry Needles – cause they don’t stick me
Aida and Linen – in colors galore
hoops and frames – I always want more
tools and gadgets – to help us along
Stitching Friends – here, on Facebook, and around the world
Designers – who make all the charts we stitch up from simple to elaborate
Cross Stitch at Craft Gossip – where I have met even more great peeps in the stitching world

I have probably left out a few things, but you get the gist – there are so many wonderful things about Cross Stitch to be thankful for each day! So make your own list and if you decide to share – the comments are open for you to declare!

Looking for more Thanksgiving-themed Cross-stitch patterns and charts? Check out these Thanksgiving-themed Cross stitch designs on Etsy and these designs on the DMC Threads website.

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Should You Use Special Needles for Cross Stitch?

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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