Embroidery How To: Cross Stitch

This installment of the embroidery tutorial series is Cross Stitch. I really like cross stitching because you don't need to transfer your design directly to the fabric, you can follow a printed or on screen pattern that is blocked out in the different colors you are using (basically like looking at a pixelated image or 8-bit video game graphic). This tutorial shows how to make a single Cross Stitch, as well as how to do several same-colored stitches in a row.

First, cross stitch is generally done on a specific cross stitch fabric , as show above. The weave of these fabrics makes it easy to see perfect squares, and the corners of these squares, where your stitches will start and end.

Start your stitch by pulling the needle through your fabric at one of the little corner holes, back to front (as shown above). It doesn't matter of you start at the top or bottom, as long as you keep your stitches uniform (if you start in the top corner, start all of your stitches in the top corner). This helps keep the back neat and avoid extra knotting while you stitch.

Next, complete the first part of your stitch by passing your needle through the hole located diagonal from your starting corner.

This will give you the fist part of your cross stitch (a diagonal line) as shown above.

To complete your single cross stitch, you will make another diagonal stitch that crosses over the first. As most cross stitch patterns don't have a lot of floating single stitches, you will generally work in lines of stitches instead. This process is shown below.

As you can see in the photo above, when making a row of stitches, you make the first diagonal stitch of your cross all the way down the line before making the second crossed stitch. This helps for a couple of reasons: it keeps the back of your work looking neater, and it help you to be able to quickly and easily count your stitches in your pattern.

I work my stitch lines from left to right initially, so when I make the "cross" stitch going back I work right to left. This makes it so you start and end in about the same place. You can then either tie a know and cut your ends, or weave the ends into your back stitches neatly.

Above you can see the back side of my row of stitches, a nice neat row of parallel stitches with my edges ready to be tied or weaved.

Cross stitch is a great stitch for making items like this, and you can easily use patterns from Perler beads to create sewn items instead. Cross stitch is also great to use with plastic canvas to make ornaments.

Turn your photographs into Embroidery patterns

Hey everyone! I saw this iphone case online quite awhile ago. If you follow me on facebook, you've seen it already. It got me thinking: "what is the best way to make your own cross stitch patterns from photos you really love? I found this image of poppies in Tuscany, Italy on a stock backgrounds site and I really like it so I thought it would be the perfect candidate to try and turn into something you could cross stitch.

The process I use is pretty basic, all you need is a photograph, and a photo editing program you are comfortable with. I happen to have Photoshop (or rather, my husband does on his computer, and it's what I used in college so it's what I prefer). There are plenty of good photo editing programs out there though, you'll just have to poke around with them to find the tools I used here.

First, open your photo in Photoshop. I generally make a copy of my original image and then paste it into a new document, to make sure I don't accidentally ruin my initial image (Not that this has EVER happened before...). Once you have this new document, feel free to crop your image, adjust levels and do any other image tweaking you want before you turn it into a pattern for embroidery (you may not want all of your flat blue sky, etc). Once I have my image cropped how I like it, Go to your "filter" menu, select the "pixelate" tab, and go to "mosaic". This will break up your image into tiny squares. You can adjust the size of these squares to give as much or as little detail in your final image as you like. Keep in mind, each square will typically make one stitch in your pattern, so the smaller your squares, the more stitching you will be doing.

Here is what you will get once you apply your mosaic filter. As you will see, the image is slightly abstract when compared to the original, but you can still see the basic image. However, it can be pretty hard to differentiate squares from each other. You can deal with this a couple of ways. First, you can enlarge your image making the squares bigger and easier to see. This isn't the best solution, as depending on the original size and quality of your image it may become very blurry when you increase the scale. My method of choice involves using more filters!


Again, go to your filter tab. This time go to the "sharpen" tab. Each image varies a little, but you will likely use some combination of "sharpen", "sharpen edges" and "sharpen more" to define the edges of your squares so you may more easily read your new pattern!

At this point you can print your image onto paper, or if you want to be more green in your crafting, you can move your stitching to your computer desk and use your pattern from the screen (this can be handy as you can zoom in and out if you think it is still hard to follow your squares).

That's all there is to it! I'm sure there are many other people who have similar techniques. If you have any tips I'd love to hear them.

Happy Crafting!

Super Mario Bros. Cross Stitch

Today I made this little Mario cross stitch. It took about 1.5 hours to do (while I was "watching" tv.) It's something I will probably end up adding on to at a later date, but for today we'll call it done. It was fairly easy to do, since the original image was an 8 bit pixelated video game. I'll be honest, It's kind of a hybrid of two much more complicated projects I had planned for this month that I ran out of time to finish (one cross stitch, and one with Mario).

So look forward to much more crafty goodness in March.

Here is a closer look at Mario himself. He's probably not as nice as he could be, but I like him all the same. It's a nice little throw back to the original Nintendo system, makes me wish I still had mine.