fiber arts!

Well, the easiest thing to do is pull waste canvas into the mix! It'll basically give you an aida-like overlay on the fabric of your choice, and it's pretty easy to use. Though in the link I put in, the writer shows the corners of the stitches being done in the big holes in the canvas, and I've heard that's not actually the best way to do it, and if you do the corners of your stitches in the little holes, you'll get better precision.

Now, for woven fabrics, things are pretty straightforward. If you're using waste canvas, you want to lay one over the other and put them into a hoop. If you're doing things by the book, you probably want to stitch the waste canvas down to the fabric with a loose running stitch, in a '+' shape from the middle out. But if you're lazy or in a rush (like me), you can just go for it regardless, though you have an increased risk of warping in the final product.

Waste canvas does tend to be pretty stiff, so it can be a bit tricky getting it into a hoop, and it's difficult to adjust or pull things taut once the hoop is in place, but the waste canvas is rigid enough that this hasn't been too much of a problem for me.

One problem I did have was that for a larger project (the mama whirl one, call it... about a 5''x7'' oval on 14-count canvas), I had so many stitches down by the end that even with pliers, I couldn't pull out most of the canvas threads after I was done stitching. Once you've got more than a few dozen stitches in a row, it's going to be real tough to pull a thread out from under those. In that case, I ended up just trimming the threads as close to the edge of the stitches as I could, and it helps that I have a pale background fabric and most of the canvas threads are white, but it's hard to see that anything is wrong unless you already know what to look for (it's a bigger problem that every fifth thread on my canvas was blue, and you can see slivers of dark past the white sections of my stitching, but again, it's not that obvious if you don't already know it's there). On my other project (the cronus footstool), I did only part of the colors at first, took everything off the hoop and removed the threads, then put it back in the hoop and finished the last few stitches using the existing stiches to eyeball the corners. I haven't had the opportunity to test that on a larger project yet, but that's my tentative plan for the future.

Plus if you have a woven fabric with a coarse enough weave, and you have good eyes, you can eyeball the count between threads to figure out your own grid. I have one friend with a non-aida cross-stitch project that was packaged that way, and vague plans to maybe do something pseudo-rustic on one of those printed burlap fabrics or something. But I have no concrete experience of my own at the moment.

And if you're looking to mess with knit fabrics, things get more complicated. I think the general rule of thumb is that you want to work on this fabric when it's stretched as far as it will be when it's in use. So if you want to stick it in a frame or something, pull it taut and you're good to go. But if you want to stitch a design onto like, the chest of a shirt, you need to work out how stretched it'll be when it's being worn, and try to get it to that same point before you start stitching on it. I... think there are ways to use waste canvas with knit fabrics, but waste canvas is so stiff and hard to manipulate that I think that has to be a pretty difficult setup to wrangle. But there are other options if you look into tearaway embroidery stabilizers. I haven't used these myself, so I don't know how easy they are to work with, but they're one of the big products that gets recommended for cross-stitching on non-aida fabric. I assume they're usable with woven fabrics too, but I'm only really familiar with the waste canvas side of things, so I can't meaningfully compare the two.

One last random blurb that doesn't fit well anywhere else: if you're planning to put this project into a frame, my experience is that thinner fabrics are harder to work with on the framing than aida fabric. Aida is pretty stiff and isn't really prone to wrinkling, but getting smooth edges and corners with thinner fabrics can be a nightmare. I managed to get something that looks pretty good, but I had to fight it hard to get there.

And that's everything I can think of for now. I hope that helps!! And I'll definitely do my best to answer any other questions that might come up :D

 

I spent my night stringing cross-stitch letters together!

Spoiler: large, politics

source one, source two, source three (i couldn't get any further than pinterest, their link was broken)

Please note, that last one is seven words long, the exact perfect length for a rainbow color scheme. With any luck, this weekend I'm going to get to working on that first one in glitter floss on black fabric to passive-aggressively hang in my cubicle at work.