After I drew my paw print pattern I got to stitching! Here’s how to cross stitch. First I’ll go a little backwards with photos of doing the cross stitch with a border I’m putting around it. But a starting note, remember, is that there is no knot at the end of the thread, you simply leave about an inch on the back side of the fabric.
In my pattern I have a lot of half squares which could be confusing. But really it either means a half of stitch, literally a half of a stitch where the needle goes through the center of the square making the diagonal half of it’s usual length.
This is the pattern complete! But I needed a way to finish it, make it actually look complete. So I decided to make a border around it.
It still quite wasn’t what I hoped so I added another border.
That looks much better to me, so now I’m going to fill it in with a cream colored thread to leave no square unstitched.
To finish the stitching part of this I decided to backstitch around the paw print to highlight it. This is easier, I think, than back stitching in sewing because it has the holes to put your needles in to make your stitches the same length and it is often used as a finishing stitch in cross stitch.
I put a pencil next to it to give a size reference. Now I need to figure out how to turn this into an ornament.