After my success with the Blackbird Designs pattern I thought it'd be fun to try to come up with my own little something. That's why you didn't hear from me for a week! Here she is, after many false starts, my little egg collecting girl. I looked to these gals for inspiration. I've got ideas for butter, apples and wool next but first I'm sitting with this gal and trying to decide if she's right.
Here's what I've learned about cross stitch so far. To get me started on my first cross stitch project I googled and found this wonderful post on Yarn tree's blog...Learn how to Cross Stitch in 5 minutes. I love succinct info like this. So much more helpful than the stack of library books I checked out. A few more things I learned while trying to design this... the linen you get at the needlework shop is amazing. It took me a very long morning of driving around to a bunch of needlework shops until I discovered the perfect shop right under my nose, Tomorrow's Heirlooms. That's where I got the linen and Crescent Colours thread I used for the pins and needles design. For egg girl I tried some linen I had on hand and it didn't work out so well. I had a problem with my design being elongated. Also my stitches were confused and I couldn't keep them nice and neat. I think the weave wasn't even enough. And I tried 3 strands of floss instead of 2 and it was a mess. Obviously wrong amount of thread for the size. I'm still trying to figure out the sizes. So then I bought DMC 28 ct linen at Joanns and it worked out well. It's very even and stiff, easy to work with, but I was wishing there were more colors at the store. I love cross stitch on darker backgrounds but I'm working on a little bird design for my mom on black and it is hard going at night, working on that dark background.
So that's what I know about xstitch so far. I have a lot to learn. If you have any bits of wisdom or great needlework shops or sites I'd love to hear!
