Charts, patterns and everything needlepoint
There’s not much better than settling down with some tea and cross stitch!
This cute design from Happiness is Cross Stitching celebrates the love of a good drink and a fun project at our side. You can make the cup solid or with stripes, use more or fewer colors, and make the embroidery floss at the bottom whatever color you like.
You can download the free pattern (there’s a coffee version, too) from Happiness is Cross Stitching.
[Photo: Happiness is Cross Stitching.]
When you put all the time and energy you do into making a great cross stitch project, it’s worth taking the time to frame it in a way that will make it look its best.
Often for smaller designs we’ll choose to frame projects in a hoop, which is cute and a fine option, especially for seasonal projects you might want to change out through the year. Others will send their finished projects for professional framing, which is a great option for gifts and heirloom items that need to be preserved, but it can also be quite expensive.
Crewel Ghoul has a great tutorial for a way that you can easily frame your cross stitch projects at home with just a few supplies.
She uses adhesive mounting board (but you can use non-adhesive board if you have some one hand or you need a size that’s not available in an adhesive version) and a few other basic supplies to secure the sides and corners of the cross stitch fabric around the board before putting the design in the frame.
This requires a bit of hand sewing, but we’re cross stitchers so I’m sure we can handle that.
Framing your cross stitch like this gives it a little padding in the frame, which makes it look better than if it were just flat in a frame with no special finishing. It’s also a great idea to use a frame without glass or to leave the glass out of the frame so it doesn’t crush your stitches.
And though this is super secure it’s not 100 percent permanent if you decide you don’t want the project framed in that way any more. Or you can take it out of the frame and the edges are still all nicely finished so you can display it a different way without having to do anything else to it.
Check out the tutorial at Crewel Ghoul.
[Photo: Crewel Ghoul.]
the links aren’t working!
If you look at the bottom of the post that is linked there are still places to download the patterns. Apparently she had some website trouble and those posts were deleted.