Cross-Stitch

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Make HERstory with Badass Cross Stitch

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badass herstory art project

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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Have you read?

Go Back to Basics with Common Cross Stitch Terms

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.