AW YISS. It’s that time, beotch! Welcome to the Steotch Fine New England Needlearts Inaugural Mystery Stitchalong.
Edit: 8/1 – The Stitchalong has now closed, and as we warned, the patterns are no longer available. Follow our page on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get notified when the next Stitchalong is underway. Otherwise check back here.
What is it?
We posted a series of cross stitch patterns at this URL. Each pattern revealed a little more of the design. A bunch of crafty craftersons stitched along with us, and created badass samplers of their very own – but didn’t know what they’d created until they’d invested way too much time to allow themselves to see it as anything but a triumph!
They shared their progress using #steotchalong on Twitter.
To see the finished sampler (and pictures from many of the fine steotchers who came along for the ride), check out our results post.
All over this!
Hi! This sounds like great fun! I do plastic canvas. If I use the 10-count sheet, think I can do it? I’d love to give it a whirl!
I can’t wait!
Can I buy all that s8’8t from you in one pop with a needle and do i need a hoop de hoop?
I don’t know about the plastic canvas- does it work for quarter stitches? This pattern uses a lot of quarter stitches. Hope you can join us!
If this is a quarter stitch, it will be a snap, since it is the basic plastic canvas stitch, too!
http://crossstitch.about.com/od/quarterstitch/ht/htsqtrst.htm
Hmm. Just be sure you’re not thinking Half Stitch. The Quarter Stitch plunges back into the center of the square- on Aida fabric, between the fine threads that cross the square.
Here’s a different visual that shows the various stitches, side by side.
http://www.yarntree.com/040halfstitch.htm
Can you swing it on plastic canvas? Do let us know! It would be rad if you could do it.
Can’t reply to the other comment for some reason. I will give it a go, can’t hurt to try! 🙂
Supplies have been acquired. Time to practice my French knots in anticipation!
Reblogged this on Whipped-Stitch Witchery and commented:
Oh yeah! Mystery cross-stitch-along! You know you want to…
You could do the steotch-along on plastic canvas (or perforated paper, for that matter) if it’s 32-count. Then you’d do the full cross-stitches over 2, and the quarter stitches would be “regular” stitches. Easy as 3.14, no?
Reblogged this on The Stitch Emporium and commented:
I’m going to stitch along with Steotch – how about you?
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So, first stupid question regarding the pattern – hooray for me!!!
Is the centre that you have marked the centre of the entire pattern? I presume so, but I’m running on little caffeine and there are multiple small children running laps through my house, so my brain is not entirely here.
Thanks!
Yes, that is the center of the entire pattern.
Are all the half stitches in the combined black brown mixed with black? Even the ones not near what I’m assuming is hair?
Yes, all of the cross stitches and quarter stitches in the day 1 pattern are either a blend of 3371 and 310, or 938
I think I worded that funny. Plus I meant to say quarter stitch when I said half. Here goes: Are the quarter stitches near the 938 cross stitches 938? Or are they the blend of 3371 and 310. It’s hard to tell on the picture as the colors are so close. Or maybe my eyes are older than I thought… 😉
I have a dumb question :/ If I’m working on 16-count Aida, should I cut my fabric to 7x5in before starting? Will that be large enough?
Oh, ok. Do you see an eyebrow in 3371 and 310? The hair (yes, you are right) and the eyebrow (and corresponding quarter stitches extending from it) are the only uses of 3371 and 310 today. All of the other stitching you see is 938. Does that help?
Yes! Thank you!
You’ll want to leave a few inches around the border to account for any fray you may experience while stitching, and also so that you have enough fabric to work with if you want to frame it.
So what would be a good size? I generally tape the edges with masking tape while I’m stitching.
I’d probably go with 8×10, though 7×9 would probably work. The fabric I use comes in a tube of 20″x24″ (I’ve seen tweets from other Steotchalongers who got this tube, too), and I always just cut it in fourths and use one of those pieces (it ends up 10×12). Does that help? You want to end up with an area 5×7 that will show up in the frame, but you want a margin around it to hold it in place. How big of a margin is a matter of preference- you can always trim it smaller, but once it’s cut, you can’t make it bigger again! HTH
Just to be sure – it’ll be 7″ tall by 5″ wide, like the House and Cook patterns? I don’t want to eat up the margin by mistake!
Check out line 5 on the front page- it gives chart dimensions- 97wide x 65high. If you’re using 16-count, the finished sampler will be almost exactly 6″across and 4″ tall, which frames up perfectly in a 5×7. If you use a different gauge of fabric, you can use the dimensions on line 5 to calculate the final size of your sampler. Does that help?
Yes, I looked at the “Design Area” but totally skipped the “Grid Size” line – thanks!
I generally like to fill a square with a 1/4 and a 3/4 stitch. Will the 1/4 stitches in this pattern be filled in with backstitch later on?
Not to worry! Yes, we’ll go over all of the quarter stitches (and add other detailing) with backstitching. You’ll see the backstitching in one of the last pattern releases.
For some reason reply isn’t showing up on your bottom comment so I’m just posting here. That’s really helpful, thanks! I generally buy the tube fabric but never thought of cutting it into fourths. I always end up not using it in the most efficient way and having pieces left over that are useless. Thanks so much for the tip!
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Is there any way to offer a non color version of each new pattern? I like to highlight what I’ve finished as I go, but especially for like day 2 my highlight would have turned black if I used it.
Hmm. it would take us a while to rebuild the patterns, the way we have things set up. Would it work for you to stick the chart inside a plastic sleeve that you could write on? Or cover it with a piece of tracing paper? I’ll try to think of other solutions.
Print the pattern in greyscale? That’s what I did. If I need to see the actual colour (or zoom in) I look at the computer version. The printout is solely for keeping track of where I am.
That’s what I did, and then if I needed color clarification, I looked at the image in color on the post.
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Finished it last month, here’s what I ended up with: http://www.unfrogged.blogspot.com/2013/07/steotch-along-finished.html
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Hi Guys. After receiving your “Kiss the Cook” and “Has anyone in this family ever even seen a chicken” samplers as a Christmas present (and spending 40 hours completing them) I was very excited to see that you had this pattern up. I grabbed all of the pages before Christmas but never looked at them too closely. Today I was planning on going to get the floss that I need and ran into a problem… Strangely, in my copy of pattern number 6 there is some issue in the “legend” section where some of the first page where several of the entries show up as blank lines, or are partially obscured. Possibly the PDF was corrupted during download? Not sure… I know that the “amnesty” is over, but do you think it would be possible to get another copy of pattern 6?
Hey Corey!
Yeah, we know those lines are blanked out on the Info Page- it’s intentional, or rather, the best we could do, given the limitations of our pattern software. Because of the complexity of the pattern, using progressive versions of the final chart, layering black and white symbols with the color ones, all the while trying to maintain symbol consistency between each pattern… it became impossible to avoid extra legend entries, just trying to convey the information we needed on the pattern. We can’t delete the entries manually, all we could do was try and “hide” the lines which weren’t included on that particular pattern release. So no worries- you’re not missing anything!
(Does that help?)
Best,
Emily
Thanks very much for the clarification Emily! Best of luck to you in the New Year!