So I made my mother a blanket this month...I actually left it for her to find on the couch, but when I woke up the next morning, I found it like this, on her bed. Felt nice. ^_^
This is the crappy photo. Good photo is here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/pmg62ipnqqcod4h/2015-06-08 01.34.56.jpg?dl=0 It's four times the memory size for some reason?
So I kinda get half my knitting patterns from cross stitch, do you think there's anyone who would do pixel art of knitting to complete the circle? :p This purse is one of my first completed projects, and I'm still disgustingly proud of it. It's not pictured, but the bottom and sides are all one strip knitted in a kind of pseudo celtic knot-ish thing.
I do! not a lot these days, but I love it. I have tried knitting, but i cant get over the tension in the stitches - I was trying to get good enough to make a copycat of this sweater i have on poupeé girl (don't judge), but my scarves all end up looking wonky, and i don't even have any idea where to begin with the pattern.
i do freehand embroidery, and i've been meaning to pick a crosstitcher's brain about it! like— pros, cons, the differences. it seems like you need special fabric? my mom has a pattern book of beautiful art noveau borders and designs that i've been sort of thinking about, and the way it precisely replicates pixel art is cool. but i already nose around with pixel art in knitting... anyway, what's fun about it? is it more satisfying and peaceful to have regular sizes of squares? i can't keep my stitches on sewing or embroidery projects even for love or money. maybe i'd do better with crosstitch.
paging @spockandawe to the thread for cross-stitch purposes cross-stitch requires a "special fabric" sometimes, i remember using differently-woven fabric (i think for thicker embroidery floss) that was visibly basket-woven, i guess you could say, with evenly-spaced "holes" where the points of the x would go. i haven't done it in years, though, so maybe kits have changed since then. and i'm sure you could probably free-hand cross-stitch, but like you said, it would require pretty even stitching and most people can't do that. part of what i liked was that it was very neat, as far as the backside goes. also very traditional. frames well. embroidery can always be worn, but cross-stitch is usually for display purposes only.
I've been perseverating on that thing! I can't speak for my skill, necessarily, but I sure am enthusiastic. I've been wanting to try freehand embroidery, because it looks gorgeous, but I'm pretty sure the difficulty curve will slap me in the face and I'll just get frustrated at the quality of my output. I'm enjoying cross-stitch a lot because the easiest way to do it does take special fabric (sold in michaels/joanns, it's like a pinprick grid and pretty inexpensive), but that keeps things uniform and countable, and it's a lot harder to get off track. I've been calling it the adult version of a coloring book (not quite accurate, because I just bought several coloring books). You can do it with regular fabric too, though to keep things even, sometimes it helps to buy tearaway grid paper. I know I had a few smocked baby dresses where my mom cross-stitched don the fabric, but there are limited wearable applications. I've found it to be very, VERY soothing. This is not very organized so far. Let me see. Pros: easier than freehand embroidery (probably also faster? But I'm not certain) easier to set aside and pick up better-defined structure for 'you do X task to complete the craft' easier to spot and fix mistakes (on the grid fabric, uneven stitches aren't really a thing) designing your own patterns is pretty easy stuff (also lots of fun patterns online, plus sites like pic2pat where you can generate patterns from images and select size/color depth and get a pdf with standard embroidery floss colors) frames easily Cons: finished products are less fancy the grid fabric is less flexible for use than normal fabric (I have no idea how well tearaway grid paper works) the stitch structure makes it really obvious on non-grid-fabric if things get lopsided the white grid fabric can stain badly if you're not careful (there are many colors) if you aren't careful with how your thread lays, you can see it through the holes in grid fabric (not a huge deal, just a factor) I want to learn proper embroidery because I'd love to use it for things like clothes, but it is possible to use cross-stitch for these things too. I'm planning to cross-stitch on a deck chair I garbage picked, and I've seen a thing for like... drilling holes in a table and cross-stitching in those. I bought the things, have not yet tried doing the thing. There are also some fun tumblrs that go into cross-stitched shapes that aren't just a plain X and touch on embroidery techniques (like these skeleton hands), but I haven't tried any of those yet, but I like the structure and spacing the grid fabric provides. The year of stitch stuff in the link below has some of these. http://badasscrossstitch.com/ If you have any questions, I'd be happy to give my best shot at answering them!
i don't think there's much of a difficulty curve in freehand embroidery. but then, i've only bothered to learn about three stitches, and mostly just use satin stitch to color things in like you might color something in with strokes of a paintbrush. you don't really need to know all the fancy stitches, because they're mostly for showy borders, but if you want to, there's plenty of youtubes, and they're all variants of 'put needle in spot a, pull it out spot b, put it back in spot c'.
you know, if you had a lightbox or just used your computer monitor as one, you could probably put graph paper behind light colored fabric and with a pencil dot the grid onto the fabric. if you wanted to embroider a shirt or something.
I've been posting some cross-stitch over in the Craft Nerd Herd thread, since I've taken it up again. the special cloth is called Aida cloth. :) I enjoy it because it's something for my hands and eyes to focus on while I listen to a class lecture or whatever. (as long as I'm just focusing on doing a row. if i have to think about the pattern then I drop the conversation slightly.) I think if I had to think about where my stitches are going (in freehand embroidery) then I'd lose that aspect, which is pretty crucial to why I'm doing it, so. I'd love love love to attempt this masterpiece. as it is now, I'm doing far smaller-scale projects, and working my way up to bigger display pieces. currently i'm working on a couple secret projects, and this cute piece for a baby shower. in case you're curious and don't want to go digging through the craft thread: Spoiler i also have a whole board of inspiration and plans for future projects. i'm hoping to start a little craft shop with @Avalon and @Imoyram and maybe our other sister - J does woodworking (currently playing with a few ideas for chess sets), I do cross-stitch and soapmaking/cosmetics/bath projects, and Imo does cross-stitch and perler bead art.
Heya! Yup. I do cross stitch too. as for cross stitching on a tshirt @roach , I saw this on pinterest a while back, it might be something to consider. This is also an interesting concept I'm excited for that idea Kay!! @Kaylotta Are the secret projects christmas presents? {:P { :P {:P { :P
