I am not a wine person. I never even graduated past a Moscato. I learned a little about wine at one of my previous jobs where I helped lay out a Wine & Food newsletter. I was then told that Moscato is for starting out, however not really what a true wine connoisseur would drink.

My aunt however is quite in the know on wines and loves visiting new vineyards to try new varieties and such things. Seriously I know nothing about this. I have been told I don’t even sample wine correctly (you spit it out?!). So based on her love of wine I found this pattern at dailycrossstitch.com to make for her birthday card.

This cross stitch was not my first venture into stitching on 22 count or hardanger fabric. I did learn that I have been going about it all wrong. I have been torturing myself stitching multiple patterns on 22 count using two pieces of thread. It’s extremely difficult, creates uneven lumpy stitches, and is overall quite aggravating. This was my fourth attempt at stitching on this size fabric.

 

Since the beginning of the year I have joined a Cross Stitch Club Facebook group. In this group people as questions such as, “How many pieces of thread do you use on 22 count?” Guess what the overwhelming answer is: ONE. Seriously! I only ventured off of 14 count kits last year so that’s one reason for not knowing this extremely helpful tidbit of info. After painstakingly stitching out the word Laugh in “bold” 2 thread. I finally decided to try 1. Just to see what happened. Holy crap it actually made stitching go so much faster! And the stitches were actually even. You can see the difference in the photo above.

The next thing I decided to do on this pattern was to correctly stitch variegated thread. Again something I learned about by seeing various people ask in the Cross Stitch Club group. Of course the part of the variegation I was on wasn’t very varied (have fun saying that three times fast), it still worked out giving a little bit of depth to the wine bottle label, see the photo below.

Now that I have learned something new, that will make my life so much easier when I need to stitch on 22 count again.

Assembly of this card was pretty standard. I pulled out the Cricut to make the frame out of heavier purple glittery cardstock. The finished pattern was placed on interfacing fabric in an attempt to keep things from stretching and warping as I put it in the frame. I still don’t think I have perfected this as I can’t get things in straight and still need to pull and prod it, which is creating bubbles. Maybe I’ll figure that out by time this birthday card project is finished.

Stitching

Started: April 1st
Finished: April 6th

Follow along on Snapchat!