More Info About Stitch Alongs

This morning I had an email from a lady who is new to cross stitching and wants to join in our Stitch Alongs. She wasn’t being negative and seemed quite happy about starting them but she did mention that the size was a concern. Honestly folks, while I’m not an expert, the size of those three has me a little concerned too. Not really because, as most of you know, not finishing in a timely manner isn’t concerning to me at all.

Here’s part of my response to her and I thought I’d share it here because I know some of you are also concerned about the size.

Three Things Sampler – You might want to stitch the strip that has the house and the trees. That’s still a lot of stitching but maybe something you’d like better than stitching the entire project.

And A Forest Grew – You could easily pick out several trees and wouldn’t even have to spend a lot of time spacing them – decide what size you wanted the piece to be and stitch your favorites. Also, the chart shows several different small pin pillows made using one tree per pillow. That might be fun to add to a dough bowl or frame a few for a little wall grouping.

This one has no border so randomly choosing trees to group together should be easy to do. Also, once you have the chart, you could choose a few trees you like, check out the colors suggested and only buy the floss for those few trees. If there’s a Hobby Lobby or JoAnn’s or any place that has a good selection of DMC, you could always add more floss if needed.

Smith Sampler – You could stitch the bottom row with the house and trees or maybe add the row above the house with the bird or just stitch that row with the bird.

If I were going to do something like that, on Smith House or Three Things Sampler, I would think about how many rows I was going to stitch. I would probably start with the top border, stitch that, then count how many rows I planned to stitch, see how those rows line up with the side borders.

I have not done the math – I am simply looking at the picture online but this is a starting idea. This all seems to me a lot like planning quilt borders so if any of you want to try cutting down these charts. I’ll be happy to help you figure it out – just know that I am not an expert and sometimes things don’t work out like I think they will. Make that . . rarely do things work out like I think they will! 🙂

Let’s think about the Smith Sampler. Say you wanted to stitch just the bottom area with the house and peacocks. That would be easy – stitch the top border and then start stitching on the house row. I would leave off the trees on the side borders that are at the top of the side border rows where the house starts because of the corner motif in the top border.

No matter how I was doing it, I would start with the top border, and after I did the math and made good notes, I would stitch at least one side border down to where I thought it should end at the bottom of where I plan to stitch. You can stitch a “framework” (not stitching all the fill in work in case you have to rip out), then stitch the center, adding in any non-stitched rows you need to stitch to be sure it will work, and once you know it will all fit as planned, stitch the bottom border.

Make sense? If not, let’s keep talking about it because I think we can figure this out easily.

Because the border repeats are larger for the Smith Sampler than for Three Things Sampler, I think it would be much easier to do the math and get it to work for Three Things Sampler, but I don’t think Smith House will be hard to figure out either. It seems like it should be like hanging wallpaper – finding the repeats and getting everything lined up.