Cross-Stitch

Charts, patterns and everything needlepoint

Stitch a Sunny Rainbow for a Kid’s Room or Whatever

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cross stitch rainbowI love rainbow colored everything and cross-stitched rainbows are just extra super cute and irresistible.

They’re also great projects for kids and others who are learning to cross stitch because all the colors make it interesting but the pattern is still predictable.

Ann’s Cross Stitch Rainbow from Cross Stitch Pattern.net is a great little design to get you started. It uses 8 colors and is 70 stitches wide by 42 tall. It would be a great little wall hanging for a kid’s room (it comes out about 5 by 3 inches) or anywhere else that needs a little bit of a lot of color.

[Photo: Cross-Stitch-Pattern.net.]

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Comments

  1. I’ve been away from cross stitching for a little while, but now I am back and looking at familiar sites and blogs. I am often disappointed, as I was when I went to Ann’s site. I was there since she started, and was delighted with all the wonderful free patterns she offered. Now I see that I must pay a monthly fee for her patterns.

    I don’t begrudge her the money, but would prefer a request for donations rather than pay a fee if I want a pattern that month or not. It’s too bad there are so few real freebie patterns anymore.

Have you read?

Finish Your Cross Stitch with Washing and Pressing

I’ll admit to not taking as much care as I should when finishing cross stitch projects. Just like blocking in knitting or crochet, taking the time to finish a cross stitch project right means it will look its best, whether you’re making it as a gift or to keep.

And when it comes to cross stitch, the best method for finishing is washing and pressing.

Kat and Catkin and Lillie makes the argument that you should always press your finished pieces, and wash them the vast majority of the time as well.

Washing of course will help if there is any visible dirt that got on the project while stitching, but it also helps remove oils and skin cells you can’t see but that can speed up damage to your project in the long run.

Washing and pressing also help remove creases from the hoop or from storing the project, and if you use heat-erasable marking pens to grid your fabric, this will remove any visible marks.

So we’ve got the why down, but what about the how?

Kat has a great step by step tutorial on how to wash your cross stitch projects and how to iron them safely.  You probably have everything you need to do this, it just takes a bit of time to go through the process. It’s certainly worth it, though, if you’ve spent a lot of time on a project and are gifting it or framing it and want to show it off to its best.

Click over to the post at Catkin and Lillie for all the details, plus some really good thoughts on times when you might not want to wash a project and how to test the colorfastness of your threads so you’ll know if a project is safe to wash.

Do you wash and press your finished cross stitch projects? I’d love to hear all about your process!

[Photo: Catkin and Lillie]

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