Sideways Cross Stitching Progress

It’s time to share with you all what progress I’ve made with my cross stitching. I can’t believe it’s been three weeks. I moved halfway through and the last week or two has just gone by so quickly. I barely got anything done, most of what I have to share is from before.

It’s not forward progress so much as sideways progress as I tested out some options for the gold stitching. I also tested out a few designs for a small piece but I’ll show you what I mean.

First up after all of your wonderful advice last time around, I tested a load of normal dmc threads, as well as DMC diamant in gold which is a single thread equivalent to two threads of dmc/one held double, and kreinik braid #4 in Japan gold.

Here they are:

It’s difficult to show the metallics in a photo well.

Out of the sample swatches I do like the look of the krenick the most because its just a lighter gold than the dmc diamant. But the kreinik is over twice as expensive and I’d need quite a few rolls of it. They both definitely look much nicer than the regular dmc though. The main problem I had with the metallic threads is that to use them you have to knot them at the needle and because I’m using 18 count fabric the knot catches every time I pull it through. I can do it but my poor arms don’t like having to do it and get achy quickly.

I’ve decided to use one of them anyway because they do look so much nicer than the regular thread, so if anyone has any idea about stopping the knot from catching so much that would be helpful. I just have to decide which.

After doing the swatches I decided to test out the one part of the design I’m least happy with. If you remember the top of the project:

On either side of the lettering will be actual bells. Originally this was the design:

But I don’t like back stitching plus it would be the only part of the whole thing that has back stitching so I don’t think it really goes with the project.

I tried stitching the ribbon in white instead:

I actually prefer the back stitched version to this one as this one looks a bit to cutesy compared to the rest of the stitching but I still don’t think it goes. So I got rid of the ribbon and tried just the bells, doing one in gold and the other in white:

Then I did the same but instead of white I did the second in back stitching.

To me the clear winner here is the bells where one is in gold and one is in white without a ribbon. But now the question is which bell should be in gold and which in white!

What do you think, do you agree with the design I picked or do you prefer the others? And which bell should be the gold, front or back?

Hopefully next time I will be back to stitching on my actual project and will have some progress to show you.

Here’s the others taking part in the stitchalong:

Avis // Claire // Gun // Carole // LucyAnn// Kate // Sue // Constanze // Debbierose // Christina // Kathy // Margaret // Cindy // Helen // Steph // Linda // Heidi // Jackie // Sunny // Hayley // Tony // Megan // Catherine // Connie

We post updates to whichever projects we’re working on every three weeks and there are some great projects to look through.

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