Gridding fabric for cross stitch -- how to grid easily

hi all this is Danna here in this video I'm gonna be showing you how to grid your fabric so that it's a little bit easier to follow a bigger pattern there's lots of reasons why you would want to grid your fabric I will show you I'll pick this up here from a mansion and in my pattern here the one I've been talking about recently you can see that I've gridded the fabric and the reason being this is actually a really big piece this would be 14 inches by 20 inches once it's finished and I've gridded the fabric in 10 by 10 squares so what I'm going to be doing is actually showing you how to grid the fabric for some people they've never really done it before so they're not really sure of what options are available to them so I'll be showing you a couple of different techniques one is using either mechanical pencil which I have here you can use either a regular pencil which is what this is and then erase it using an artist's a vinyl artist eraser sorry I'm just trying to focus focus is here yes this is a regular artist eraser you can get from even craft shops art shops stationery shops really really cheap and this will cleanly erase your pencil off of your fabric as you can use a mechanical pencil you can actually get special mechanical pencils that are different colors so if you're not using a white fabric which I am then that might be handy you can also use these kind of water erasable fabric marking pens I actually just got this here's the package here so I haven't actually tried this out yet but yeah so these ones will erase with water you get it wet so a for example after you finish your piece you usually wash it and then maybe stretch it depending on how you're stitching and that will erase all of the blue lines this particular one is blue I would double check it and make sure that it will erase before you mark out your whole fabric just in case there's especially if you're using a hand dyed fabric I would really double check that but usually for the for the pre-manufactured this is a 14 count 8 of fabric should be fine but I would double check it just to be on the safe side so you can either use the pens and pencils which I will be showing you shortly or you can do stitching there is some neat stuff it's like a nylon thread and it's called easy count guideline and basically it kind of looks like a really thin fishing line and I've done this with actual the sewing thread so you can kind of see what you can do so you can actually grid your fabric out using that this is a 22 count fabric here so I've gone over ten so I've gone up and down every tenth so you can actually grid your fabric out that way and then when you with if you're using the actual ez count the nylon stuff you can just stitch over it stitch around it whatnot and then pull the threads out all in one hit so this is one way to grid your fabric out in blocks of 10 the reason I'm doing blocks of 10 is if you look at any pattern they're all going to have or every single one I've seen anyway has a darker line on the actual pattern every tenth column and every tenth row so that will help you delineate your tens I've seen some that are easy read ones that are every eighth one in which case you would want to mark your fabric every eighth stitch so that it matches up with the darker lines that are on your actual pattern so that's one way to do it this is up and down every tenth stitch and then this is another way this is in this case it's under six and up for under six up four so it's still ten but it just looks a little bit different you can do five and five if that's easier for you so using the the yeah it's called a ez count guideline thread that's basically a really thin fishing line or nylon thread you can use that and actually stitch through your fabric if you don't want to draw directly onto your fabric so that's one option another a third option is actually to use fabric that's pre gridded obviously you're going to be pretty limited as to what you can access with that there is some stuff called Magic Guide that's put out by DMC which is one of the main floss manufacturers and that's actually pre gridded and that I believe either washes out or it well the guidelines will disappear once you iron it I haven't used it so I'm not sure about that but I know the guidelines will disappear you just have to check the instructions and figure out how that works so what I'm going to be doing in this video is I'm just gonna be showing you I'm not gonna demonstrate how to stitch us I mean that's fairly self-explanatory you can just choose whichever way works best for you up and over tens or you know six and four or five and five whatever is easiest for you see it on the back as well so that's stitching method I'm just gonna quickly demonstrate the drawing method so depending on the size of your piece of fabric I'm just gonna use a small sample here I've got a couple of different rulers I've got this giant ruler that's 24 inches long big steel ruler which you can use for bigger pieces in this case I'm gonna use my smaller steel ruler which is only 12 inches long or 30 centimeters long so what I'm gonna do and one thing I would say grading your fabric does take some time you do have to be really accurate because obviously you don't want to make mistakes cuz that's gonna translate into mistakes when you're stitching but this will take some time but once you do it it's actually gonna save you a lot of time and a lot of heartache because it's gonna make counting your pattern you're following your pattern a lot easier particularly if you work like how I do and do cross country will just sort of working in one color across a bigger area working in another color it makes counting exactly where your stitches are supposed to be going a lot easier sorry I'm just dropping the phone here makes it uh counting a lot easier it's not gonna do percent prevent any mistakes obviously you know you still have to be careful about how you count but the grading is really gonna make your life a lot easier if you do work in this manner you kind of work across a whole piece at once or in a bigger section at once so what I'm gonna do I want you're just gonna use the pencil because that's what I've used before be on the flat this pin I can show you quickly it's really really fine tip and actually marked a little bit of the fabric back here just to see what there comes out like and that's what the color ends up like there so it is a nice vivid blue color in this case I'm going to use the mechanical pencil I would use something like this pen or another color of the pen if you're using much finer fabric like this is 22 count this is 14 count so you don't pin cyl is a little bit wider of a tip so obviously if your fabric is really really fine you're gonna want to find the finest marking Hootin so you can okay so let's say your so I'm gonna sorta measure this here this is about 12 and a half centimetres wide here so let's say for example that your piece that you're wanting to stitch the finish size is let's say three centimeters so it's like gonna be about yea big so if you've never plotted out your pattern on a piece of fabric before you would take your finish size in inches or centimeters what however your pattern is printed then you would add an extra three inches which is about seven and a half centimeters on all the sides of that so like say if your pattern was three centimeters you're gonna add your seven and a half centimeters or seven and a half centimeters on either side and that's gonna give you a three inch border around it so that's going to give you enough space around the edge as you can see here on my piece here you can see it's got a border around it that's gonna give you enough space for you to frame or to do in this case or put it in your hoop things like that so you do want to leave some space around all the corners of your pattern so let's say for example that I'm not going to measure this exactly but let's say for example this is going to be my top left corner of my pattern here and it's going to come across and down and then it's going to be roughly centered here so what I'm gonna do I'm going to choose one row and so even if here is the top of your piece you're going to want to extend your lines beyond that just gonna make your life a little bit easier and I'll show you that in a second so I'm just gonna choose that one line and so you're gonna want to line your ruler up quite accurately with the actual holes the row of holes because that's where you're wanting your lines to be is actually on that row of holes so you can see I've drawn my first line here so here's my crossbar here let's say just for argument's sake I want the end to be about here obviously I would actually in actual practice I would leave a little bit more space but let's just say it's there for just this example so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to count this way 10 rows that way I'll get my next vertical so here's your start line here 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 make a little mark and I'm always I always double-check that's your 10 in there and I actually put the tip of my pencil or your pen whatever using into the holes and kind of skip it across and that way you're gonna be making sure you're not missing a hole so here's your vertical there the next line so I like using the mechanical pencil it does work really well for the AIDA fabric and for this thread count in particular because it's always going to be the same sharpen so you don't have to keep worrying about sharpening your pencil and obviously it leaves a nice nice mark and I'm just gonna do one more over cuz you gonna get the idea out for a minute the good thing about this is once you find just that little bit of the row then you literally just line up the edge of your ruler along that row of holes and you're guaranteed to be on the same row all the way down so like I said if you are using a bigger piece of fabric you can use a shorter ruler and then just keep trying it up but there is a small chance that you might make a mistake unless you kind of overlap your lines a lot like safe do that like that and then keep keep going down that way so I actually use a bigger ruler for that if I'm going to be a much bigger piece all right so the horizontal one so I've already decided that this is going to be the upper left corner of my pattern so this works whether it's a full-coverage piece or whether it's just going to say be a motif or something that's centered in the middle you can still do it this way and that way your your pattern is going to be centered on your fabric most of my pieces I've been doing recently are little coverage okay so it's a little bit hard to see with the angle of the camera I'm trying a little bit closer so you can see it you'll see it once I draw it so again extending my line a bit beyond the beginning and out alright so same thing exactly the same thing you're just counting one two yep okay so again you line up your ruler along there and the horizontal row of holes and draw there you go so it is important to be quite as accurate as possible because you don't want your line to accidentally start crossing into the center of say especially the eight of fabric you can see you can see how you can see how in the aid of fabric there is a fair amount of sort of thread in the middle so you definitely want to try to be as accurate as you can because you don't want your line accidentally starting to wander into the middle of the group of threads because then you're not going to be sure whether your 10 your grid line is on this side of that or on this side so that's why it's really important to have like a sharp pencil or a mechanical pencil or the fine tip pen like I showed you before and that way you're gonna be pretty much guaranteed that your your lines are gonna be really really clean and you're actually gonna always know where they are so that's pretty much how you do the gridding if you want to keep going down so for it save my endpoint is here at countdown 10 mark again countdown 10 market again you can obviously do this based off of your pattern so like let's say it was just a I'm just gonna draw a little flower here let's say you have a little flower here and let's say your pattern is your flower and it's already got the grid lines on the pattern you're gonna want to make sure that you have so let's say it's 30 by 30 you're gonna want to make sure you have 30 by 30 so that you have space for your pattern to be translated onto your actual fabric and like I said this artists erasers are really really good ironically these are actually really good for a lot of things a lot of people don't know much about them but they're actually designed to not smudge and smear which is why they're called artist erasers it's just a white vinyl but you can actually clean metals and like like military metals any kind of metal or anything that's tarnished you can actually rub the tarnish off with this which is really cool so you don't have to use a metal polish or anything like that so race I think this racer might be a bit old yes you can see it has smudged it a little bit but I just did try it it could actually be the lead in this pencil as well so I would definitely try it before just to make sure but when I actually did try it on this piece here with the pencil that I was using I just randomly grabbed that mechanical pencil it did erase really really cleanly I'm also drawing a fair amount harder than I might normally in order to do these lines of so they show up on camera better but yeah so I would draw them quite as neatly as you can but so you can still see them you can see actually in my actual piece here you can see them but they're not crazy visible I did try to draw them just enough that you can see them without making them too dark and as you can see in the pattern the lines do extend beyond the edge of the pattern the reason for that is like let's say for example I don't work on this piece for a couple of months and I get back to it and then I can't figure out where I am vertically and horizontally I can count these and I know that each one of these bars is ten stitches so that's another way to measure out your pattern as well is to count by stitches because usually your pattern is gonna have a stitch count whether it's like say thirty five stitches across seventy five stitches down for doing blocks of ten then that's obviously gonna be help you lay out your pattern a lot better yeah so that's pretty much it for now if you have any questions please feel free to let me know like I said this isn't erasing as cleanly just because I didn't test this pencil before I think the LEDs in this there's probably a little bit too dark because like you can get different densities a pencil led after using something like this marker here obviously that's gonna work exactly how it's supposed to because it's designed to be washed away with water I just used a pencil led because that was all I had before I bought this pen and like I said I did test it on my other piece and it works just well I think it's just probably the pencil led is a little dark and I was pushing quite hard into the fabric to make sure it's visible so yeah that's all I have for you if you have any questions or anything please feel free to let me know and I will talk to you next time bye for now

Channel: Peacock & Fig

Views: 181,365

Keywords: cross stitch gridding, gridding, how to grid cross stitch fabric, gridding cross stitch, cross stitch techniques, cross stitch, cross stitch parking method, cross stitch tutorial, cross stitch patterns, stitch, stitching, floss tube, Flosstube, instruction, tutorial, grid, fabric, Aida, needlework, embroidery, handstitching, hand embroidery, 자수, kanavice, broderie, クロスステッチ, point de croix, punto croce, punto de cruz, kanaviçe, kreuzstitch, xstitch

Id: ssbczuD5xL4

Length: 17min 6sec (1026 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2015