How to Needlepoint your House

For many stitchers, it’s a dream to do a needlepoint of your house. If you are getting ready to undertake this project it is one you can do yourself. But it’s also one where you need to beware.

The key to making a needlepoint of any building work is to simplify. Needlepoint is not a photo, it conveys texture through threads and stitches and this texture is designed to give the effect of the item in real life, not depict it realistically.

Consider this log cabin. The logs are so wide that realistically these trees wouldn’t exist (they’d need to be more than 3 feet in diameter). Because the stitch conveys the effect of logs, it works.

This is different from Cross Stitch because Cross Stitch, like photos, conveys texture through color changes. That’s why you can take a photo, convert it into a chart and get acceptable Cross Stitch. Rarely are the results for needlepoint good unless you work with an expert, such as my friend Sandy Grossman-Morris.

Using the book Your House in Needlepoint as your helper, a better choice is to do it yourself. Begin with a good clear picture of your house and some blank paper. Use the paper to draw a very rough sketch of your house. Ask yourself some questions:

• What is its basic shape?
• How many stories?
• Where’s the door?
• How much of the roof do you see?
• Do you see the garage?
• How many windows are there?

At this point, don’t worry about details, style, or landscaping. Doors and windows should just be empty boxes.

Armed with this sketch, make a few copies so that you can make lots of notes and mistakes. Immediately put one away to be the reference for drawing the outline on canvas.

You’ll make several kinds of notes initially, using one sketch for each type of information. Make notes of the colors. Use another sketch to make notes about style, materials, and details. Use this information and the suggestions in the book to make notes about possible stitches. Use another copy to sketch in landscaping.

Once you have these things decided, get some graph paper. Without charting the entire house, chart out some features such as doors and windows. The amount of space you need to stitch a multi-paned window for example will determine how many threads need to be between windows which, in turn, will determine the overall size of your house on the canvas. Keep track of all these calculations and use them, along with an enlarged version of your sketch as a reference, to draw the basic outline of your house on canvas.

Double check the dimensions and then draw in the outlines of the major features. When you stitch you’ll use your charts, not the canvas, to stitch them correctly.

Then you have the fun of picking the threads and stitches to needlepoint your house. The book has tons of examples of photos and stitched versions of many styles of houses, so it’s a real treat.

While this is a major project and more of a foray into design than many would do, you can tackle it.

If you love buildings but need more ideas for stitches, consider my 25 Stitches for Buildings class, available from Napa Needlepoint.