Cross stitch is an innovative form of embroidery which is basically a double stitch forming a X in sewing and embroidery. It could also be needlework made of X stitches.

One of the stunning cross stitch projects I came across was : Capture The Mystery Of Egypt project – Ancient Egyptian Cross Stitch. This features 25 glittering and historically accurate projects from the pyramids, the Great Sphinx to the hieroglyphics. It covers the scarabs to the river Nile. Few of the larger projects include King Tutankhamen, Sphinx and a goddess. It also has quite a large amount of smaller motifs ideal for bookmarks including Osiris, the eye of Horus, Isis, Anubis. At the end of the book you can find a few border designs. This book uses quite a lot of color mostly green, red, yellow, and blue. It provides colored charts containing symbols for easy identification. A definite must have for any cross stitcher!

The inner powers really reveal themselves in this creative guide. You could use these as attractive wall hangings or bag adornments.

I thought of treating all of you to some of the best free embroidery design resources available on the web. Check out the first resource at ABC. This contains good quality free machine embroidery designs. Once you register and log in to the website, you can avail of the design formats available in art, pes, hus, pcs, jef, xxx, dst, exp, shv, vip and sew formats. For more information on these formats, reach out at PC Machine embroidery formats. Most of the embroidery patterns are less than 5 inches in width and height with not more than 15 color threads which makes it quite easy to replicate. Debsews has a small but cute collection of free applique embroidery designs. The free standing lace coaster is done quite symmetrically well. FreeTommy displays one new free embroidery design every hour. Most of these designs are cross stitch and done quite beautifully. All Free Embroidery Designs displays a free design every day and has a collection of free embroideries. You could log into this resource. You could also submit your free embroidery design at All-Free for display.

I came across this resource called Jersey Forms, Body Forms (you see this just above this post and below the image) – on elegant accessories done using flower and beadwork embroidery techniques. It is called “A touch of Asia” and features various jewellery containers, lipstick cases and change purses. This collection contains some unique and simple beadwork on an otherwise ordinary purse. The beadwork fruit motif and rooster are good examples of these. The watermelon (shaped like a cut piece) is sized at 5″ x 3.5″ and the pineapple is 4″ x 4″. The rooster purse which comes with a blue background (sized at 4.25″ x 3.88″) and multi color combination looks awesome.

The jewellery container is a satin folding pouch sized at 8.63″ x 5.5″. The highlight of this piece is the flower embroidery on its outer covers. Some other products are the coin purse with side charm, 5 in 1 Asian multipurpose accessories clutch and the satin covered lipstick case with mirror.

Embroidery softwares form a powerful tool in effective designing and an embroiderer often uses these tools for monograms, digitizing, sizing, fonts to name a few. Digitizing is the art of porting simple embroidery designs, photos, logos or clipart into a computer readable format which makes it a standard and universal method of replicating these designs to the same specifications in the shortest possible time.

Check out this collection of softwares at Sewing Machine Outlet. Apart from the digitizing softwares available, they have unique sizing and monogram software. The Melco sizing software has features like full scaling of designs with automatic stitch adjustment, it can rotate and transform designs, can adjust stitch counts by adding or removing stitches to retain design quality and has the ability to read or write major commercial and home formats. The embroidery card convertor boxes has the ability to read and write most embroidery formats to blank card and can download pre-digitized designs from internet, PC, hard drive. A blank card can hold up to 6 designs at a time and can work with almost all embroidery machines and existing embroidery software.

The click ‘n stitch ‘xtra with applique software (you can see the front cover above this post) can quickly create embroidery, cross-stitch and applique designs from clip art or scanned images.

Here is a preview to a world class style of stitching – the Brazilian embroidery stitching technique. The Brazilian Dimensional Embroidery International Guild Inc began in 1991 with the single objective of promoting the art of Brazilian embroidery. This non profit organisation used the platform of seminars, newsletters, websites and workshops as a tool to popularise this amazing art.

Some of the stiching styles can be viewed at their web page. The popular stitch types are the bullion, buttonhole, drizzle, leaf, pistil and stem categories. As you notice, nature has played a large role in moulding this art. This technique of hand embroidery has been explained in detail at the instructions page of the above mentioned website. For example in the leaf stitch, the formation of the knots and anchoring towards the tip of the leaf has been explained lucidly. The drizzle stitch is a version of cast-on-buttonhole stitch, which can be plain (which creates a spiralling effect) or up-down (which creates a firm drizzle and does not spiral).