Make HERstory with Badass Cross Stitch

Have you ever seen embroidery samplers or quilts in museums, or even your own family heirlooms, and wondered what life was like for the women who made those pieces?

When Shannon from Badass Cross Stitch was gifted a couple of old embroidery projects by her future in-laws, she became consumed with the idea that the things we make are a way to tell our stories, and she decided to take that idea and make it huge.

The result is Badass Herstory, a multi-craft fiber arts project encouraging women and gender non-binary people to learn fiber arts as a way to express themselves and ultimately produce a small project that will become a part of an immense installation and a digital museum sharing the stories of each project.

This is such a cool idea and is stunningly ambitious (her goal is to collection one million pieces) but I really love it. Check out the details page for tons of great information to guide you to tell your story, produce your piece, document it and send it to Shannon for inclusion in her project.

What do you think about this? Are you going to submit? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

[Photo: Badass HERstory.]

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Celebrate International Women's Day with Cross Stitch

Lately I have been feeling like all of my clothes are looking a little worn or feeling a little tired. I don’t want to buy new clothes, though, so there’s been a lot of mending, altering and adding special touches to things that otherwise might get overlooked or not worn at all.

As an example, not too long ago I added a little bit of embroidery to a T-shirt, which was a lot of fun to do and made me start eyeing all my solid-colored garments and wondering how they might look with some stitching added.

Of course you can cross stitch on garments, too, whether T-shirts or woven tops, skirts, pants and more. But it can be tricky to transfer cross stitch designs to your garment to make stitching easier.

Much like with embroidery, it’s great to use a water soluble stabilizer to keep your fabric in place while you stitch and to transfer your design (or your cross stitch grid at least) while you’re stitching. Then you just wash away the stabilizer when you’re done and it will look like the stitching has always been there.

Ashley General Handmade uses Sulky Stick ‘n Stitch, which is a product I use, too. It’s easy to use and washes away cleanly.

To make it even easier, she designed some printable cross stitch grids at different counts that you can print out to draw your own cross stitch designs, but you can also print the grid right on the Sulky, so you can stitch on top of squares and then remove them when you’re done.

Brilliant, right?

She has pages as big as 8 count and all the way down to 20 (remember: the bigger the number the smaller the stitches will be) that you can download and print to make your own designs and also use to make stitching on clothing easier. I’m definitely going to try this the next time I want to cross stitch on fabric!

You can grab her printables over at Ashley General Handmade.

[Photo: Ashley General Handmade]

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