Painted Paper Bookmark

When you’re new to a craft, you don’t know what you don’t know. It always surprises me the really basic questions that people ask in knitting and crochet Facebook groups that I’m in, things you’d think “everyone” knows like the difference between different needle sizes and yarn weights, but if you’ve never done that craft before, it makes sense you wouldn’t know things more seasoned people consider basic.

It’s the same with cross stitch. There are lots of easy cross stitch mistakes you might be making as a new stitcher (or even when you have more experience) that can affect your work.

For example, fabric size. I went years not knowing there were different counts of cross stitch fabric, and since most projects are worked on 14 count and that’s what’s most commonly sold, too, I never had a problem. But if your pattern calls for a particular size of fabric and you use something else, your project will come out a different size than expected, which could be a problem.

That’s just one of the common cross stitch mistakes you’ll find explored in this blog post from Crewel Ghoul. The others are maybe not quite as basic and they’re things that sometimes might turn out OK but other times can cause a big mess that you might not know how to fix if you’re new to cross stitching.

Even if you’re more experienced you might want to click over and read her tips so you can make sure you are doing the best you can to make sure your cross stitch project turns out great.

One thing that’s not on the list that I’m sometimes still guilty of is not making all the stitches in the same order so the project ends up looking like it has stripes! What beginner mistakes did you make that you’ve since learned to do better (even if you don’t always do better)?

[Photo: Crewel Ghoul]