Cross Stitched Pendants

This past Christmas, I made cross stitch pendants as gifts. I thought they could be used for necklaces, keychains or Christmas ornaments. I designed two patterns and used each pattern twice, using different color schemes.

Since the pendant was one inch in diameter, I wanted to have a finer stitch so there could be more detail in the design. I decided to use aida cloth that had about 26 stitches per inch (rather than the 14 stiches per inch that I’ve used in the past). The result: it took a lot longer to finish than I anticipated. But overall, it turned out fairly well.

Putting the finished cross stitch into the pendant also took some doing. I messed up the first time (which sucked). In the end, I cut out a chipboard circle that had a 0.875-inch diameter. I cut the cross stitch piece to a square (wider than one inch) and then trimmed the corners.

I placed the chipboard circle in the middle of the cross stitch piece and added book binding glue to the back of the chipboard circle and pressed the cloth edges around it. I applied glue to the pendant. Then I pressed the circle piece onto the pendant to adhere it to the glue. I tried my best to make sure the design was centered. It took some doing to get all the edges down within the pendent circle area; fingernails and tweezers helped to get the edges smoother.

I found cross stitching the designs to be fun and relaxing, but gluing the finished design was a bit stressful because if you mess up, you have to start all over (which happened).

Cross Stitching Fun

When a couple of friends and I were planning to get together, one friend suggested taking a class—like cross stitching. She sent a link to the class, and my other friend’s response was, “$60! For $60 each, we could get all the supplies and make our own class.” And that’s what we ended up doing.

One friend got some Aida fabric and embroidery floss from a thrift store. And when we met up, we went to a craft store to get extra supplies (just some hoops and needles). The grand total for everything was about $7 a piece.

I picked up a couple of cross stitching books from the library, and we followed their straightforward directions. And after a couple of early mistakes, we all got into the rhythm of cross stitching. It has to be one of the simplest crafts to do. I knew nothing, and after about 10 minutes, I was stitching right along.

My friends picked a couple of images online to replicate. I just picked these classic video game characters from one of the cross stitching books I had. Truthfully, I didn’t really care too much about what I was making, I just wanted to learn how to cross stitch doing something fairly easy. I followed the pattern to a point; I did alter some of the characters so they would align more vertically and horizontally.

It did take a good amount of time to finish, but I finished it over the course of a week. I liked cross stitching—it was very relaxing. The only downside is I’m not sure what to do with the finished cross stitch…I’ll have to think about it. But I think this might be a craft that sticks. It was pretty fun and creative and very low stress.