Using Counting Pins in Cross Stitch

Here’s another topic in cross stitch that I didn’t know anything about until I found a post about it: counting pins.

I mean, it makes sense that you could use pins as an alternative to gridding your cross stitch fabric for a big project, but I guess I had never heard of anyone doing it or how it might be done until I saw this post from Stitching the Night Away.

Tommye J Bunce explains that counting pins are like blunt tapestry needles and they are a specific thing that’s made for this purpose — you don’t just use sewing pins to mark your design grid.

These pins can be used to mark out an area where you’re stitching the same color for a long time. Say you have 25 stitches in a row that are the same color. Instead of counting as you stitch (and recounting over and over to make sure you’ve got the right number) you can just mark those 25 stitches with pins and know that every stitch between them is the same color.

You can also use them to help you mark your place when you’re stitching some distance from the last stitches you worked. Say you’re stitching all the parts that are in one color and part of it is away from the rest.

You can get more details on what counting pins are and how to use them from the post at Stitching the Night Away. Tommye sold counting pins until their retirement but you can find lots of options on Etsy, including the colorful ones shown above, which are from Stitchingly Along.

Have you ever used counting pins for cross stitch? I’d love to hear about it. Or if you’re new to knowing these things exist let me know that too and make me feel better!

[Photo via Stitchingly Along]

There are a lot of stories out there these days about AI use in the crafting space for everything from answering technique questions to writing patterns.

And there’s a lot of content about how to spot AI patterns, or even just photos on the Internet that people are claiming to have made but are clearly AI generated.

As the models get better, though, it can be harder to tell. Gone (mostly) are the days of AI sewing patterns with models who have too many fingers, but one thing it’s still hard for AI to replicate is individual stitches.

You’ll see this in knitting, crochet and cross stitch, where a project might look good from a distance but if you zoom in you’ll see there aren’t individual stitches, or they don’t look the way real stitches would look.

That’s part of the rationale behind a change at r/CrossStitch, the largest cross stitch community on Reddit, which now requires people to show a close up of their finished projects (lots of people seem to be showing off the backs, too) to prove their projects aren’t AI.

Lord Libidan reported on this news and I agree with them that I’m not sure why people in an online forum would be sharing AI “finished objects” when it’s a venue where you can’t sell patterns. But I understand their desire to keep the forum free of AI images. I wish Etsy had such a requirement so that people selling patterns had to prove they’d actually stitched them (though there are plenty of patterns that just show a chart and not a finished item, AI or not.)

Lord Libidan probably has a different perspective because he’s seen people selling kits made from an AI version of a free cross stitch pattern of his. Which is another layer.

I have my own feelings about AI and crafting but I just think it’s really interesting both the things people will do with AI without saying it’s AI and the lengths other people will go to in order to prove something is or isn’t AI. Or even calling something AI just because it’s really detailed and looks good? What times we live in.

[Photo via Lord Libidan, closeup of an image made by Google Gemini’s Nano Banana]

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