Tips when making your Cross Stitch Kit

Hi it's Alice here the owner and maker behind SimplyWishes.

I'd thought I'd write a little blog post with some tips I've picked up while making my cross stitch kits, from stitching to finishing.

1. Stitching
When starting off with a piece of thread for cross stitch you don't actually need to knot the end of your thread. You can either leave a a small tail underneath your work and after a few stitched it will have become anchored and it will just stay in place, or you can tuck it underneath previous stitches to keep the underneath as neat as the front!
I prefer not to knot my thread as it can get in the way later, some of hole will had 4 or even more stitch going through it, if you have a knot underneath than hole you can accidentally try to stitch your needle through your knot and get in a right pickle and sometimes more knots! See the photos below for an example of 'hiding' your thread.

2. Finishing your hoop.
There are multiple ways to finish off you hoop, some people simply cut the aida really close to the underside of your hoop so it can't be seen from the front. I however don't like to do this as if you ever wanted to take your work out of the hoop to re stretch it say, it's very unlikely you'll be able to get it in again without the excess fabric to stretch it.

I instead trim my aida leaving a good 3cm border, then using some of your excess thread do a large running stitch 1cm in from the edge of the fabric, when you’ve done a full circle pull tight and the fabric will gather inwards and tie a large knot to keep the fabric in place.

Next grab your felt and cut it into a circle slightly smaller than your hoop – an easy way to do this is to draw around the hoop onto your felt and then cut it inside of the drawn line.

I then like to stitch the felt onto the back side of the hoop. You can do this by using a similar shade of thread to your felt and doing again quite large stitch to attach your felt to the bunched up aida underneath, you can also pull the felt tight with your stitches to keep it even neater!

I hope these few tips have helped and if you've bought or been given a cross stitch of mine I would LOVE to see it! Please share it online with the hashtag #simplywishescrossstitch - where you can also see all my my designs on instagram too! @simplywishesuk