Ways to Make Your Cross Stitches Neater

When we start cross stitching, most of the time we are just focused on getting the needle into the correct hole in the fabric and keeping our tension even so that our stitching looks good. But over time you might want to refine your technique to make your stitches even neater.

One of the problems with cross stitching is that the thread tends to twist as we stitch, making stitches that don’t lie totally flat. The good news is lots of smart stitchers have figured out ways to counteract that twist and help make stitches that look better across a project.

You can read about three of these methods in depth over at HubPages, but I’ll cover them really quickly here.

The first I have talked about before and that’s railroading, which is where you split the two threads you are stitching with and take your stitch between them to keep them separate and therefore untwisted. (Read more about that here.) This is pretty easy to do and once you start doing it, will become a habit pretty quickly.

The post linked above also suggests that you can counter the twist in your thread by taking the needle through the fabric eye first instead of needle tip first when coming up from the back of the work. I’ve never tried this but it sounds like it would be pretty awkward.

Another thing that can help is just making sure that when you are stitching, the working thread is positioned above the area where you are making stitches. This doesn’t really help with the twisting, but it can help the stitches look more even and lie flatter on the fabric.

Have you tried any of these techniques? Do you have other tips for making your cross stitches neater? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

[Photo via HubPages]

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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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