Don’t get the title wrong. I love me some cross stitch! I design it, after all… and I’m in love with the work of many many other designers out there – Tracy Horner, Joan Elliott, Jennifer Aikman-Smith, Erik Shipley– I’m looking at you! and a lot of others, too!
But sometimes I just want something else. So I turn to other forms of embroidery. WHY? Here are five of my favorite reasons…
1. I don’t have to count.Sometimes numbers just hurt my head; and putting the right number of stitches in the right place in the right color hurts even worse!
2. Some designs are just smoother in “traditional” embroidery than the pixellated version created by little crosses (or the designs are WAY too huge for the intended end use!).
3. I can stitch on anything. I love my expensive evenweave linens. I love to stitch on silk. But sometimes, you know, it’s nice to just pick up a piece of cotton fabric from one of my husband’s old dress shirts out of my fabric bin and stitch something. I have yet to get the tension right for waste canvas: so needlepainting or other stitching genres it is!
4. I lean toward big, complicated cross stitch charts. Sometimes it’s nice to choose my own colors without worrying about how it’s going to affect everything else in someone else’s design. 🙂
5. Did I mention I don’t have to count?
