Tips for Stitching Red Gate Stitchery Kits

I loved stitching the Red Gate Stitchery kits and I tried several. Here are some tips that will help make this stitching a breeze.

Grounds

Red Gate’s grounds can be divided into two groups. Materials such as bamboo, acrylic and leather are stiff. This means you can only get your needle through the drilled holes. You’ll find this much easier if yo pay attention to the way you hold your needle. Try to hold it perpendicular to the item.

Cork and felt are thinner, more flexible, and softer. Needles, especially smaller ones, will go through these grounds. While you still should be careful about the needle’s position, you might find the needle poking up where it isn’t wanted. When that happens, unthread the needle and pull it out.

Needles

The kits come with #28 needles, which is pretty small. These are hard for me to see, so I tried #22 which I had close by. It was too thick to go through the holes. #24 and #26 both worked. I did find though that #24 needles got stuck when there were several stitches sharing a hole. When these jams happened. I placed the project with the needle’s eye against some wood. Some pressure would push the needle through.

Using other Threads

Of course I couldn’t just use floss on these projects. I made one project with overdyed crewel wool and another project with two colors of Kreinik #4. While thicker threads would work if you were doing needlepoint instead of cross stitch, I found these covered nicely.

Red Gate recommends using two strands of floss. This gave full coverage on the bamboo bookmark, but was thin coverage on the coasters. It looks as if there is enough room for slightly thicker threads, but I did not try this.

The Staining Problem

The only problem I found was that there was significant darkening where the thread went through the eye on both the leather and cork items. Since it appeared nowhere else I figure it’s because the wider eye ribs against the sides of the holes staining the thread.

This is more apparent on lighter threads. You can easily keep this from marring your work by keeping your needle parked in one place and by ending each thread when you reach the tail.

#28 needles are too small for me, so I don’t know if this will happen with them.

Finishing

The items were in general easy to finish. I do plan on beefing up the coasters some. The cork coasters are made from the same cork used on bulletin boards. It’s thin and flexible. I’m worried they might break. I’m going to cut a piece of plastic canvas slightly small all around than the coaster and glue it to the back. Then I will cover that with a piece of felt the same size as the coaster. This will make a thicker, stiffer coaster.

Conclusion

Apart from the staining, which wasn’t hard to work around, there were simply no problem with these kits. I was easily able to finish each within a few hours and I loved the results. You will too.