Starting to Cross Stitch ✂ Cross Stitch for Beginners 🎒 CROSS STITCH UNIVERSITY

[Music] hi i'm kimberly welcome back to cross stitch university today we're going to take our first stitch we're going to take the fabric that we've prepared in our previous videos and we're going to start stitching in the top left now because we gave a three inch margin you can start anywhere in this little area and that means i'm going to start right here and this is the gray star so i'm going to look at my legend and my gray star is dmc 414 so let's start by cutting our thread and threading our needle when you're pulling your thread out of dmc you always want to pull the thread from the number side because it will not not if you pull your thread from this side you will have a lot of knots so put your hand over and pull that's one length it'll stop pull again that's another length and stop then cut and you have a strand that's about 30 inches and using sharp scissors is going to be important in cross stitch so we'll lay our thread here and we're going to open our needles i'm using pat carson needles because i think they're the best and they do not leave residue and i think as a beginner you're going to get the best results so you just open this it's kind of like a little gum package and you just pull one needle out and then wrap it all the way back up and it'll stay nice in your little package when you take your dmc off of the skein there are six strands of floss and we need two strands as stated in the pattern so you want to just pull them out one at a time so you just find one keep your finger right here nice and taut and pull now if you keep it taut you've got one strand over here and as long as your finger is tight here it's going to come off real nice and then for this what i'm going to do is just wrap it on my fingers and put it back on my thread stack so it is going to just stay in one little spot now we'll take our two strands and put them back together and you want to keep them in the same direction they were when they came off of your skein so you want to put these two back together now i would not recommend trying to pull two strands out at one time because it will become tangled and you're going to get the best result if you pull one strand out at a time and put them back together just like they came off the skein so just to put them back together and then you just want to straighten them and then we're ready to thread our needle there's two different ways to thread a needle the first and the easiest for a beginner is to take a fresh cut and just pinch the threads and thread your needle now it will take you a long time to get used to this but pack carson needles have a bigger hole which is better for beginners and it's going to be much easier to thread this needle a second way to thread your needle would be to pinch a little section like this and you're pinching it all the way in your fingers and you put your needle like this and you pull it through that's a little bit more advanced and you can just try both of those methods the key is going to be having a either a straight cut on your thread and pinching tight we're going to start with the gray 414 and i'm going to show you how to start stitching and after we get a couple of stitches in we'll come back and i'll show you how to count how many stitches all the way across we're going to start anywhere in this top left section and you're going to take your needle and come up through any of these holes from the back in cross stitch you always want your bottom part of your x and the top part of your x to go the same direction and that's what i'm going to teach you i'm also going to be doing half stitches across and then coming back and finishing the x later and that is called the danish method so the first thing is is to pull your needle through you want to make sure you're right in the hole and not in between because the hole is very defined on ada turn it over and pull your thread until you have about one inch left we're going to be covering up this tail with our stitches and that's going to anchor your thread so keep your finger here go back to the front i'm going to go from the bottom left to the top right and as you see my needle is going right in that hole you don't want to go into the middle over here turn it over pull your needle until it's nice and flush and you can feel that and you can see that it's nice and flat we came up in this hole we want to go back down in the hole right below it but we also want to be covering our tail so just move your tail go in the hole right below it cover your tail nice and taut so hold this down push your needle and pull to the front and it will just you'll know you're there because it's taut and again we want to go from the bottom left hole to the top right hole just like we did pull from the back and you don't want to pull your stitches too tight if you do it will look like this just pull it gently and it should just lie nice and flat but not too taut now we want to come back up again down here because we are doing the layer on the bottom all the way across you'll see the results of that in a second so go back to the back your tail is nice and starting to get flat you want to go directly in the hole below the stitch you came up in which is right here pull to the front and you've covered that tail go back to the front bottom left to top right and your stitches are laying nice and flat they're not too tight turn it over go in the hole directly below the hole you came up in and we're going to do that a couple more times to secure the tail [Music] [Music] now we've covered the tail with five stitches and i feel that five stitches is enough and we're going to clip the tail and this is why we're going to use sharp scissors you're just going to clip right there and when you're clipping keep your scissors this way instead of this way so that you don't accidentally cut your ada cloth and having sharp scissors will help you get your tail cut nice we're going to go back to our pattern and we're going to count so like i said there are lines highlighted every 10 so i'm going to count across 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 plus one so i need to do 71 half stitches all the way across [Music] now as you're stitching if you think your stitches are getting messy i don't think mine are but i'm going to give you a tip on what to do if you feel that your stitches are not laying nice and flat unthread your needle and pull your two strands completely apart straighten them put them back together and re-thread your needle so again i'm going to pinch my threads tightly and thread and you can leave your tail as long as you want right there you just don't want it to be longer than your stitches [Music] [Music] now as you're stitching you will see eventually this tail is going to catch up with your stitching and you don't want to keep stitching with that because that would turn it from two strands to four strands so you'll just pull with your needle slightly to keep it at two strands [Music] now you can see right there a little knot formed so what you want to do is just wiggle it with your needle a little bit unthread the previous stitch and what you'll do you'll see a little hole put your needle in the hole pull and the knot will come out now at this point again separate your threads completely come back together and re-thread at this point you want to look at the back and make sure your stitches are nice and clean and if you see any tingling or knots you want to unstitch and go back and fix it [Music] so i have 71 across and that is our bottom of the cross stitch so it's a half stitch now we're going to go across the other side and we're going to go from the bottom right to the top left [Music] now as i'm going across every now and then i'm going to look at the back and make sure that everything is looking nice and right here i see a little piece from the edge that went in my stitching i'm going to just cut that out and just keep going [Music] so now my thread is getting short so i'm going to go ahead and finish off this thread so i'm gonna go back to the back turn my piece over now i'm gonna run the needle through five of my stitches so one two three four five and you don't have to go under the stitch all the way just generally through part of the stitch pull it through and you just want to tug it very gently look at the front and make sure it's not puffy right here so that you've got it taut you don't want it to be too taut though or you'll see where you end and again take your scissors and just cut so now i'm going to re-thread using two strands just like we did before thread the needle we're going to restart where we previously ended so come up in this hole turn your piece over pull to where you have a tail that's about one inch except we're going to be going the other direction to cover it up put your thumb there go back to do your stitch and my tail is over here and you're going to cover it up with five stitches [Music] once you've covered it with five stitches just trim and again moving your blade this direction and we're gonna go all the way to the end of the row [Music] [Music] [Music] so now we have 71 stitches for the top row and that matches the 71 stitches here now i'm going to keep going by going down and that's going to be the same 71 and i'm going to show you how to count 10 20 30 40 50 60 71 but this time i'm going in the top right hole to the bottom left hole [Music] now i'm going to continue stitching all the way up and i'm going to start my thread just like i did previously so i have stitched the top row and the left side and we need to mark what is the top so i'm going to show you how to do that and why it's important so i want to just know that this is my top so we've put a lot of extra fabric around the edge and i'm just going to write the word top that way when i come back it's going the right way and i'm going to show you how when you're cross stitching you always want your x's to go the same direction on the top row your top stitch goes this direction now i've turned this to the side now if we hadn't labeled this as the top we might pick up our project and go the wrong direction and you can see this top stitch is going this direction which is not the correct way next stitch the bottom then the right side when we come back i will have that done and i'm going to show you the loop and english method on our next portion of the pattern now we have our outer border stitched and we're going to move to the next piece which is right here that is a pound sign so if i go back to my legend my pound sign is 597 pull your dmc skein 597 if you keep your hand over the entire skein pull twice and cut now i'm going to show you how to start using the loop method you have six strands you can kind of go like this find one of your strands and this time we're only going to pull one strand out to do the loop method take one strand join the ends then you're going to thread your needle here so when you join your two threads here it creates two strands so what i will do is use this as a counter so i'm going to count one two three so on the gray stitch the third one down i'm gonna skip one square and start in the next square we're going to count down three stitches we're going to leave one space and we're going to come up in this hole come up from the back go down on the top right so all of your stitches are the same as previously flip to the back and you see there's a loop right there put your needle in the loop and pull and then you want to wiggle it a little bit where your loop kind of lands in the center so that it doesn't go to the front in either of the holes then you'll go back down like you did previously so that is how you start with the loop method and that is how it looks on the back when we stitched we did half stitch all the way across and finished the stitch coming back and that is called the danish method now i'm going to show you the english method which is where you do one cross stitch at a time so i would just go back over here and there's one x come back down on the bottom left top right bottom right and top left and if you look at it it looks exactly the same as the row above so you can try both methods to see what you like the best and what i'm going to do is i'm going to do one x at a time all the way across until i'm one stitch away because that is what my pattern shows [Music] we completed this top part of our inner border and we're going to stop there for today so make sure you get all of this done before next week now to summarize you can start like we did with the gray using the tail method and that's where you cover your tail or you can start with the loop method like we did with the blue now if you look at my stitches they look exactly the same and on the gray thread we use the danish method where we stitched all the way across using half stitches and we came back to complete them with the blue we use the english method where we stitched one stitch at a time now you can interchange those so you could do the tail method with the english method and you could do the loop method with the danish method so i would try all of them and see which one you like best so those are the starting basics on how you stitch if you have questions make sure to comment below so i can answer subscribe to this channel and click the bell to be notified for more cross stitch university lectures class dismissed [Music]

Channel: Fat Quarter Shop FlossTube

Views: 20,624

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Keywords: cross stitch, flosstube, cross stitch for beginners, how to cross stitch, cross stitch tutorial, cross stitch patterns, cross stitch basics, how to, cross stitch tips, diy, kimberly jolly, fat quarter shop, fat quarter shop tutorials, cross stitch university, stitch along, cross stitch tutorials, first cross stitch, learn to cross stitch, beginner cross stitch, free cross stitch patterns, fqsflosstube, beginner cross stitch tutorial, cross stitch fabric, starting to stitch

Id: LREl6joqZWM

Length: 24min 46sec (1486 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 13 2021