My Poinsettia Cross-Stitch

We did something new in Embroidery Club last Monday...machine embroidery cross stitch.

Many years ago I hand-crossed stitched two little projects.

They were cute but it took forever to hand-stitch all those little x's. 

Machine cross stitch is faster.  

Our instructor gave us a link (click here) to download some beautiful flower on-line cross stitch designs called "2011 Teacup Posies" prior to the class.

(color chart here)

I downloaded two designs with red flowers:  August's "Poppies" and December's "Poinsettia"...cuz ya know I love red. 

Traditionally hand cross-stitch is stitched in flat cotton threads not shiny embroidery threads.  

To prepare for the class I gathered several shades of different cotton and polyester threads in red and green from my stash.  

Some of these threads hadn't been touched in decades and were dusty and some were so old they were on "wooden" spools.

  

The design I picked…December's "Poinsettia" had 26 color changes and over 33,000 stitches.  

Between each color change you had to manually cut the thread jumps.  

And there were a lot of thread jumps...seemed like a billion.

Even though my machine's embroidery screen said the design would stitch out in about an hour it actually took several hours with changing thread colors and manually cutting all the thread jumps.

But it's still faster than hand cross-stitch! 

You need color variation on cross stitch or the design will disappear.

This happened to one of the ladies in our class who didn't follow the correct color threads chart and her design disappeared into a muddle of threads.    

Luckily I had enough color shades so my design stitched out beautifully.   

Maybe I should make another one?  

Our instructor set out a whole table of beautiful cross-stitch design packets to purchase.  

I couldn't help myself.  

I can't pass up the Christmas designs.  

I bought three of the Sudberry Christmas Classics cross-stitch packets because they included cute Santa Claus designs.

  

There are six really cute Santa Clauses that would be adorable in a quilted wall hanging.

I would have to start early to complete them!

That's all for today.  

Thanks for visiting.