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How To Create Cross Stitch Designs

How To Create Cross Stitch Designs

Using a stencil and grid paper, you can create a design to cross stitch onto whatever fabric you want. Create your own!

I'm going to show you now how to design a cross stitch design. What you will need is some grid paper or graph paper that looks like this, a pencil for tracing, something you can get a design from, either a stencil or even something you have printed off like that. You'll also need a light source so that you can trace easily.

If you don't have a light box, a window on a sunny day will help you do that. I'm going to take this design, which is a stencil, and lay it over my grid paper. Then taking a pencil and holding the stencil still, I'm going to draw around the shapes.

So, this will be the outline of my cross stitch pattern which you will do with a back stitch or double-running stitch. I'll just do that flower. There's the outline.

And then, all you need to do now is fill in your crosses. So, some of these will be half cross stitches. Some of them will be full cross stitches.

And just go through the whole design filling in your crosses so you can see what's half and what's full. And then, like I said, the outline you will stitch with a back stitch or a double-running stitch and the inside you can do with a cross stitch and you can decide on your colors for each section of the design. You would need to use a full cross stitch when you've got a full square showing in your design.

A half cross stitch or a tent stitch, you can do when only half of your square is available to you. You may want to decide to only do full cross stitches but there will then be a small gap between your outline and your cross stitch. So, to do your cross stitch design, you can use this cross stitch fabric like this.

You can decide on how big your cross stitch is going to be and this is the thread you would use, the embroidery floss, they call it. You can split this floss into the separate yarns so there are six strands and you can split it. The finer you want your work to be, the less strands you use.

You may want to do your outline in, say, three strands but the fill design of the cross stitch in two or one strand. The thicker the strands, the more shading and contrast. .