Cross Stitch for Beginners: Your First Hour

The stitch, and there is only one

A cross stitch is two diagonals. Come up through the bottom left hole of a square, go down through the top right. Come up through the bottom right, go down through the top left. That is one stitch, and it is the entire technique of the craft.

The squares are the little woven blocks of the aida, and the holes are at their corners. One chart square equals one cross, which is the thing most people get wrong in the first ten minutes: the grid on the chart is a map of crosses, not a map of holes.

The first ten minutes, before any thread

None of this is stitching, and all of it saves an evening later.

1. Cut the cloth bigger than the design. Three inches more in each direction, so a design 2.9 by 2.3 inches wants a piece around 5.9 by 5.3. That spare is what a hoop grips and what gets folded over a board at the end.
2. Stop it fraying. A line of masking tape round the edge, or a zigzag on a sewing machine, or an overcast stitch by hand. Aida sheds threads for the whole life of the project otherwise.
3. Find the centre. Fold in half, then in half the other way. The creases cross at the middle.
4. Find the centre of the chart, marked by arrows at the middle of each edge, and put your first stitch where the two meet.
5. Cut about 45 cm of floss, roughly fingertips to elbow, and pull out two strands one at a time. Two strands is standard on 14 count.

Then anchor the thread, which is the one step where the obvious answer is the wrong one. Do not tie a knot. A knot is a lump that shows through the front once the piece is stretched, and it pulls through the weave more easily than you expect. Use the loop start or an away knot instead, both of which take about the same four seconds as tying and are set out in starting a thread without a knot.

What the first hour actually contains

Here is the part nobody prints, because it needs a model rather than an opinion. Below is the same first project costed at three paces. The pace of 14 stitches a minute is what our model uses for a comfortable stitcher; five and nine are a beginner and an improving beginner, and those two are an assumption rather than a measurement, so treat them as a bracket.

Those figures already include rethreading, and they account for the fact that some squares on a chart take a double cross rather than a plain one, which is why 14 a minute comes out as 560 crosses an hour rather than 840. On 14 count aida there are 196 crosses in a square inch, so an hour of a beginner’s stitching is a patch a bit larger than a postage stamp.

That is the honest scale of the thing, and it is worth knowing before you start rather than after. It is also why the size of the first project matters more than anything else you will decide.

Both charts are drawn at the same scale, one square to one square. The red block is 15 by 15, the first hour. On the small chart it is a serious dent; on the large one it is a corner of the porch.

Choose a first project you will finish

The model run below is the same photograph converted at four sizes, six or twelve colours, 14 count, two strands. The last column is the total at a beginner pace of five stitches a minute.

Forty by thirty two. That is the recommendation, and it will feel too small while you are choosing.

It is a bookmark, a card, an ornament, five evenings. Finishing it teaches you the whole craft: anchoring, counting, changing colour, running out of thread, and the specific feeling of having made a thing. The 140 by 112 portrait teaches you the same lessons and then asks for another sixty hours, and it is the single most common reason a beginner’s fabric ends up in a drawer with three inches of stitching on it.

If the picture you want is a portrait, do the small version first. The arithmetic behind that trade, and why hours grow with area rather than with width, is in how long a piece takes.

The order of the first hour

• Minutes 0 to 10. Cut, tape the edge, fold for the centre, thread the needle, anchor without a knot.
• Minutes 10 to 25. The first twenty or thirty stitches, slowly, checking the chart against the cloth after every ten.
• Minutes 25 to 55. A block of one colour. This is where the rate picks up and where the thing starts looking like something.
• The last five minutes. Finish the thread rather than leaving the needle dangling: run it under four or five stitches on the back and clip. Write down which colour you were on.

A solid block of one colour first is not laziness, it is the fastest way to see progress, and progress is what gets a beginner to the second evening.

Four things that go wrong, in order of frequency

Counting from the wrong line. Use the bold lines on the chart, drawn every ten squares for exactly this reason, rather than counting eleven squares one at a time. The rest of what a chart is telling you is in how to read a chart.

The thread twisting into a knot. You pulled two strands out of the bundle at once. Pull them out one at a time and lay them back together.

Stitches going in the wrong direction. Half of them lean left, half lean right, and the surface looks scruffy. Fix it now while it is twenty stitches.

A miscount you notice much later. One row out, discovered ten rows on, is about 1,387 stitches to unpick. That number and what to do about it are in fixing a cross stitch mistake.

What not to worry about in hour one

Tension, backstitch, fractional stitches, parking threads, railroading, whether your back is tidy. All of it is real and none of it belongs in the first evening. The back of a first piece looks like a bird’s nest and nobody frames the back. Come back to the neat version on the third project.

The sizes, hours and material costs on this page came out of the model that Flossgrid runs on, from one photograph converted at four different grid sizes with everything else held still.