Cross-Stitch

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Sign Up for 2012 TUSAL – Totally Useless Stitch-a-long

by 4 Comments

As I wandered around stitchy blogs I kept running into a mysterious term – TUSAL – and I wondered what in the world it meant. Until I found Daffycat’s blog and unearthed the meaning of the term. TUSAL stands for Totally Useless Stitch-a-long. Read on to learn more.

If you would like to join the TUSAL for 2012 leave a comment on this post at It’s a Daffycat. The rules are simple:

1. Get a glass container and save your thread clippings or ORTs (Old Ratty Threads!) Some stitchers include fabric trimmings, thread bands or any other stitching cast-offs they gather. You may continue filling this jar throughout the year OR you may empty the jar and start over each month ~ no firm rules here!

2. On (or about) each New Moon take a picture of the ORTs in your jar and post it to your blog. This is a blog game so YES, you MUST have a blog to be included.

3. Yes, you can use your current ORT jar or jars.

Read More About the TUSAL

Next Pattern:

Comments

  1. Too funny! I’ve been doing that for awhile and just dumped my useless thread. Just started another one a few weeks ago! 🙂

  2. I saw this at the beginning of 2011 and started a jar but never posted pictures. I’m happy to report my jar is almost full and I will empty it on Dec. 31 to start again. I’m saving the threa for the birds in the spring, they can make pretty nests.

  3. Did you know that you can take those threads, sandwich them between two layers of watersoluble interfacing, quilt like crazy on your machine, dissolve the layers, and have a pretty neat, original piece of fabric to play with?

Have you read?

Book Review: Cross Stitch Flowers

The Dover Pocketbook Collection book Cross Stitch Flowers is a collection of floral designs by Gerda Bengtosson, reflecting the handworks of the Danish embroidery tradition. Haandarbejdets Fremme, known elsewhere as Danish Design, was a movement begun in 1928 to preserve and promote embroidery in the country. 

The book includes 26 charts and a section on materials and basic instructions. The patterns are shown in a color chart on one page and include a thread palette and section for notes on the opposite page. The general descriptions of colors are used, such as dull blue green or earth color, rather than giving a DMC number or the code from a different thread company. This does allow you more wiggle room to use what you have but you may not necessarily end up with the same look the designer was going for.

That doesn’t really matter, though, and there are no photos of the finished stitched designs, just the charts, so it’s easy to go your own way and choose whatever colors you like. (There’s also space in the palette or in the notes section where you could write down the colors you use in case you want to duplicate the design in the future.)

The charts are large and have dark lines every 10 stitches or rows doe ease in reading. They look hand colored, and they only use full stitches so they should be relatively easy to stitch even though some of them are big. It would have been nice for the patterns to say approximately how big the finished design would be on different sizes of fabric so you know what you’re getting into without having to do the math yourself.

The patterns show a variety of flowers, from common plants like daisies and dandelions to snow gentian, plantain and Iceland poppy, to name a few. Most designs have around 8-10 different colors.

I feel like a lot of stitchers would want to see stitched versions of projects before they start stitching, but if you’re OK with just looking at the chart to decide what you want to stitch, this is a nice collection of floral patterns to stitch and a bare-bones book that allows you to focus on the charts without a lot of frills.

About the book: 64 pages, paperback, 26 patterns. Published 2025 by Dover Publications. Suggested retail price $9.99.

 

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