Frustrating Stitch — What Do You Do?

Updated August 23, 2019.
I’m working on a project and decided I’d try some new stitches from Stitch INs & OUTs. Two in fact. This happens to me often when I try new stitches. It no longer scares me and it shouldn’t scare you.

The first stitch went very well, it was easy to stitch and if I hadn’t been diverted by watching TV there would have been no mistakes.

But then I started the other stitch. I studied the diagram carefully and started near the top of the area. I screwed up on the second unit and had to cut it out.

The second time I started I managed to stitch two rows. They looked fine. The start of the third row looked fine too, but soon I ran into trouble.

The accent stitches, done in a second color, were lined up incorrectly, so I knew the main units were placed wrong.

I had suspected it because this unit isn’t supposed to end the same way for every row.

I spent almost an hour cutting everything out.

Here’s the method that works best for me in these cases. First, put the work down and do something else for awhile — even for a day or two. Before you try the stitch again, look at the diagram. For every stitch there are a number of methods to make it. Certainly in this case I hadn’t chosen the best.

The easiest method to make stitches creates single units of the stitch and then groups them into lines or simple shapes such as squares or rectangles. These shapes may not be obvious when you first look at a stitch. At this point look at your stitch diagram again. Did you miss units? Can you use them to build the stitch?

In my case I had missed the nice even rectangles two units of the stitch made. Realizing this I could make a row of units and from there I could place the first unit of the next row. I’m now more than halfway through the area.

What do you do when you’re learning a stitch and it’s not working out?