Tips for Stitching on Black Fabric

I generally like to use light colored cross stitch fabric when I work, mostly because I don’t want the frustration of not being able to see what I’m doing all that well. But I’ll admit the allure of working with dark fabric is strong, because it can really make your projects pop and it’s perfect for Halloween projects or other moody scenes.

I was happy to find this post from Stitching the Night Away that’s full of tips for making it a little easier to work with dark cross stitch fabric, because using all these tips I feel like I just might be able to pull of stitching one of these projects.

I won’t spoil the whole article for you so you can still click over there and read all the tips, but I did want to touch on a couple of them. The first you can probably guess: good lighting.

In the case of working with black fabric, it’s probably not enough to use your usual lighting situation. You might need to work under a bright lamp or even use a head lamp or a reading light that goes around your neck, because it will shine down on your work and make it easier to see the holes in the fabric.

One thing the post mentions that I hadn’t thought of before is using pins to help you count. Similar to adding a grid to your fabric, which might be harder to do on dark fabric, you can use pins to mark out a section of stitching or help you count the number of stitches left blank between two areas of stitching. There are special pins for this purpose (which she talks about in her post) that are blunt so they don’t damage your fabric, but I imagine if you were careful with them you could use regular sewing pins for this purpose.

Head over to Stitching the Night Away to read all the tips. If you have any more insight into how to work with black cross stitch fabric more easily, I’d love to hear it!

[Photo via DMC]

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How to Railroad Your Cross Stitch

If you love patterns for frogs and sardines, animals, food, flowers and more, Happy Cross Stitchers has got you covered. With more than 1,600 patterns as of this writing, you’re almost guaranteed to find something you like.

I don’t know if I’ve missed something that cross stitch patterns featuring sardines are showing up everywhere (this is the second designer I’ve seen with them in the past month or so) but Happy Cross Stitchers has 60 sardine cross stitch patterns. They also have 200 patterns with flowers, and even more than that in their biggest category, which is animals.

Many of the animal cross stitch patterns have a modern nursery feel to them, like this set of four modern boho animal patterns featuring what I’m interpreting as owls, a moose (or it coulr be a deer), a donkey and a cow. Each individual pattern is 100 by 100 stitches and they use six or seven colors. The designs will come out to 7.1 inches or 18.14 cm when stitched on 14 count fabric.

There’s also a large number of Christmas cross stitch patterns, with lots of trees, little houses, Santas and word art. There are lots of bunnies, eggs and chicks in the Easter section.

The modern designs include lots of colorful, graphic florals. There are also well over 100 butterflies, many of which at least look like they could be inspired by real butterflies (though none of them are labeled as to what kind of butterfly they are).

You’ll also find plenty of cute and often funny cat and dog cross stitch patterns, though there are a lot more cats than dogs represented. And then there’s the food section, with patterns for fruits, different kinds of toast, a jar of pickles, doughnuts and more.

And that’s not even all there is in this store! I guess all this is a long way of saying there’s a lot of fun patterns at www.etsy.com/shop/HappyCrossStitchers on Etsy and you should go browse because you’ll probably find something you like. And if you do, I’d like to hear about it!

[Photo: Happy Cross Stitchers]

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