Learn to Cross Stitch in Minutes

If you’re making a New Year’s resolution to learn how to cross stitch — or you want to teach someone how to cross stitch in the new year — check out this overview from Yarn Tree, which says you can learn to cross stitch in five minutes.

The page covers the basic tools, how to get started, make stitches and finish your work, and includes a simple balloon pattern to try for your first project. It only covers regular x cross stitching and backstitching, so this is a really quick, not-too-detailed overview that should get you started but of course is not the end of all you might need to know about cross stitch.

Still, it will certainly keep you from feeling intimidated and hopefully encourage you to dive right in and give it a try.

If you have any tips for teaching cross stitch to others, or things that helped when you were learning, we’d love to hear them!

[Photo via Yarn Tree.]

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35+ Sunflower Cross Stitch Patterns

It’s back to school time where I live, which I always feel like is a great time to learn a new skill or take a deeper dive into something that you might not have learned a lot about before.

Usually when we are learning new hobbies we only know what we know. We learn the terms that we encounter, the skills that come up in the projects that we want to make. It’s not that we don’t care about other basics or different approaches, we just learn what we need to know to make what we want to make.

And that’s totally fine, but sometimes it’s a good idea to go back and review the basics or learn the things you might have missed the first time.

In that spirit I share this post from Caterpillar Cross Stitch all about basic cross stitch terms that every stitcher ought to know.

Did you know that the little bundle of thread you use for cross stitch is called a skein, for example? Or the difference between grid size and design area in a pattern? Or that working complete stitches one at a time is known as the English method? (I didn’t know that one! Apparently doing half of the stitch across the row and then coming back and finishing it is the Danish method. Who knew?)

There’s also a little bit about getting started with confidence that might be helpful at any skill level.

So what I’m saying is, even if you feel like you know a lot about cross stitch already, head over to Caterpillar Cross Stitch and check out their list of terms and make sure you know them all. If nothing else you’ll feel a little smarter, either because you already knew them all or you learned something new!

And if you do learn something new, I’d love to hear about it.

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