Day 201 and X

Ah, embroidery. It takes so many forms and this form happens to be cross-stitch. Before I learned to knit, cross-stitching was my preferred form of domestic art. I'm now a yarn convert, but every now and then, it's fun and relaxing to visit my roots.

Here we have a very plain, very blank, very boring, very inexpensive scarf which can be found at any dollar store in America. Not much of a statement the way it is, but it does offer a very large canvas! Depending on the size of the design of you're cross-stitching, it might be prudent to purchase some waste canvas which is an even-weave fabric that can be used as your grid and then pulled away one thread at a time when the design is finished.

For this project, I picked out a couple of skull designs from Makoto's Cross-stitch Super Collection and since they're a little bit punk and a little bit funky, I went ahead and pictured the grid in my head. I had waste canvas on hand, but I rather like the slightly uneven look for these two motifs. Since the background fabric isn't on a grid of it's own, you could rotate each design in any direction at all if you so chose. Just remember that the thicker and denser your material, the sharper your needle needs to be. This scarf was a thin woven fleece and I got away with using a blunt embroidery needle. If I had been working on a herringbone fabric or through more than one layer, I would definitely have needed a sharp crewel needle and a thimble to save my little piggies.