Let's talk about gridding. Hey there! I'm Sarah with the Notorious
Needle, and I want to empower you to break the rules of conventional cross
stitch so you can make whatever you want. So what is gridding?
Gridding is a way to mark your cross stitch fabric
to make it look more like your pattern chart.
On your chart you have a grid, and every 10 squares on that grid is marked
with a heavier grid line. Why grid at all? You can count your fabric by 10 squares
at a time instead of counting one at a time. So if
you're a cross country stitcher like i am,
and you stitch all of one color first before moving on to another color,
you might have sections of your pattern that are dozens of stitches apart.
It's much easier to count accurately if your fabric
is gridded. There's two primary ways for gridding.
One is to write on the fabric. And the other is to weave an extra
thread into the fabric. So with the first way,
writing, you don't want to write with just
anything. It's hard to erase. What you need to grade your fabric is a
water erasable pen. Here's one that I found on
Amazon. The color of the pen that you use to
grid the fabric should strongly contrast the color of the fabric.
This pen is bright blue and you can see it clearly when I write on the fabric.
First test a small corner of the fabric and wait a few hours and try to wash it
off to make sure that the water soluble pen will actually
wash off of your fabric. To grid, start in the center, line up your
pen and grid over the holes. Count ten squares, and write along the next set of holes. Keep doing this across the entire length
of cloth. Count twice to make sure you don't make
any mistakes. Flip your fabric 90 degrees, and write
along the other direction. Now your fabric looks just like your
pattern chart. You can you also use the water soluble pen to mark the center,
or with your pattern gridded, you know just how far away from the corner you
can start at the edge of your pattern. Extend the lines beyond the edges of
your pattern so you can see them even after you
start stitching. How do you remove the water soluble ink?
Simple. You just soak it in water. Follow the directions on the package for the
water soluble pen that you purchased. Using the erasable ink to grid your
fabric is really fast. The only problem is, if you make a
mistake, you have to wash it out before you can correct that mistake. And
that may take some time. The other method for gridding your
fabric is to use a wire. You could use fishing wire, but that
tends to be rather thick and somewhat clear, which makes it a
little bit harder to see against your fabric. Again you want a
wire, just like a pen, that's going to be a
color that's in high contrast to your embroidery fabric. On my most
recent project, I tried a product called Easy Count
Guideline. I did find it very easy to use. Let me show you. Easy Count Guideline
boasts that you can cut your cross stitching time by at least a third.
While i didn't measure my time, I did find that it was a lot easier to cross
stitch, and I didn't have to count and recount
and then triple count to avoid miscounting mistakes. Easy Count
comes on a spool. It looks like you should thread your -
you should thread the wire through this little hole here,
but in the directions they specifically state not to remove the wire
from - not to remove the cover from the spool.
So instead I pulled my wire out the side, and it worked just fine and did not
unravel. The product also comes with these easy to follow instructions to
grid your fabric. While i did find the instructions
helpful, I did make a few changes. I'm going to thread a piece of wire
into my needle to help get it through the cloth easier.
It's a little bit slippery so you may want to have a long tail
on the other side of the eye of the needle. When you grid your fabric with the wire, you need to grid it in multiples of 10,
just like with the pen. But instead of just counting 10 and writing across
you have to weave the wire through the fabric. So I'm going to start in the top
left hand corner and count 10 columns - one ...
And now I'm going to count four squares down. All right. Now I've counted 10 over and
4 down, I'm going to go 4 more down.
Then I'm going to continue counting 6, 4, 6, 4, And there I finished the first column.
I'm up for 4, down for 6, up for 4, down for 6,
4 and 6 and 4 and 6 and so on. Double counting each way
to make sure that I have counted correctly.
i did four and six because four plus six is ten. Now I am going to leave the wire
connected. This is one of the cool things that they
told you to do in the instructions. You leave the wire connected so that
when you're done, you just have one big piece that you
need to pull out. And that's especially useful for
something - a small piece of scrap - for a small piece of fabric like this. If
you're using a larger piece You may want to just use - cut it and have
a separate piece for each column and a separate piece for each
row and then tie off the ends. But for a little piece like this, I'm
going to leave it all connected. You definitely want to make sure that
you have enough wire that hangs off the edge of your fabric so that you can see
where the wire is even after you've stitched over it. So
I'm going to count 10 columns over, and I'm not going to pull the wire quite
all the way through. I've got this little loop here so when
I'm done I can just pull the loop out. Now i'm going to continue on four, six,
four, six and so on up and down until I've
completed all the columns in this scrap piece of
fabric. When you're stitching on the nylon wire,
it's important not to pierce the wire. That's why we use nylon and not
embroidery floss. If you pierce the wire using a pointy
embroidery needle and you go through it, you won't be able
to slip it out from behind your stitches. It's slippery stuff so I triple knotted
the two ends. But here is the first part of the
finished grid. All the columns are connected. This is one long piece
of nylon wire. Now I'm going to go over in the same
pattern. I'm going to go over four, under six, over four, under six, and I want
to make sure that my over four on the rows crosses the over four
from the columns. So I finished gridding using the nylon
wire and this is what it looks like. Every 10 stitches there is a cross piece
of wire and you can easily see 100 stitches
in each of these square boxes. Now if you use the weaving method
you can use however many squares you want. You can go
up six and down four or you can go up eight and down two or vice versa,
whatever makes it easier for you to see your fabric and count it.
Wherever the grid lines cross is where the grid lines should cross on your
pattern, making it way easier to count. Also, while moving
your hoop around and changing your embroidery frame, you
don't want to tug on the wires too much this could create holes wherever the
wire pierces the fabric. Now, those holes usually disappear when
you wash and iron your fabric, but one of the reasons why people like
to use the the wire - the nylon wire instead of the
water soluble pen is so you don't have to wash your project
if you don't want to. Here is an example of a project that I gridded with the
easy guide nylon wire. It's a baby bib. And I wanted to
show you how to remove the nylon wire. Here is the back of the project where
you can see that i have one long string for all of the columns that I gridded,
and then another long string for the few rows that I gridded. I'm just going to
snip off the knots, and slide the wire right out. That was easy. Took less than two minutes.
There's no doubt if you want to get your gridding done quickly
you should use the water soluble pen. The part that takes longer is on the side of
cleanup. Washing the fabric takes longer than just slipping the wire
out from underneath your stitches. When you're using linen or evenweave
with a very fine stitch count, you'll probably want to use the wire.
Most of the water soluble pens for gridding your fabric have a thicker
tip. The tip is not fine enough to get in
between the fibers and it makes it really hard to see
where your needle is supposed to go which moots the whole point.
So which way do you grid? Do you use the water soluble pen,
or do you use nylon wire? Or do you cheat and buy pre-gridded fabric? This is an
example of fabric from Zweigart. This is 20 count aida cloth, gridded as you
can see, with gray line. And just like the
water-soluble pen, this washes right out in lukewarm water.
Some stitchers just always grid as a precaution against
miscounting. There is nothing wrong with that. If that's what
works for you, go for it! what do you prefer? To grid, or not to
grid? Let me know. ;-) Stitch on!
