Strawberry Stitches

A tutorial on Stitches on a Strawberry Pincushion Thingy.

What you will need.

A longish sharp needle.

Thread you like.

Sharp scissors.

Oh, and a thimble. I forgot about it till the end when I realized I didn't want to puncture my finger.  Imagine that.

Thread your needle using two strands of floss. Make a big knot.

Insert your needle at the top of the strawberry to one side of the seam. I am using my right hand so it is at the left of the seam. I'm taking pictures with my right hand and holding the berry with my left. Confusing enough yet? I try.

Depending on how big you want your X's go down some and put your needle in the fabric about 1/8 to 1/4 away from the seam and out the other side the same amount.  Pull the thread through.

Bring your needle back up and put it in the fabric lining it up with where you started and coming out a smidge below where the thread is coming out of the strawberry.

Go back down to make another X and put your needle in  1/8 to 1/4 inch from seam and come out the other side like you did before.

Pull thread through. It will look like this.

Go back up and put your needle in the previous hole of the last stitch. Bring the needle out right below where the thread is coming out of the strawberry like you did before.

Go down to make another X. 

Continue along. I"m watching X-Files right now.

Using the upper last stitch as your guide to put your needle in, it keeps your stitches looking even.

It goes pretty quickly once you get your rhythm. I can't decide which season of X-Files is my favorite. I own all of them on DVD and know all the episodes by title which scares my husband for some reason.

I made my stitches big, sometimes I make them little.

Getting towards the bottom. Keep going the same way until the last stitch. It changes then. Tooms is my favorite episode in season one.

Here is where it changes. At the end go further down below the thread nearer the tip of the berry.

Now when you go back up and put your needle in the bottom of the last stitch bring it out to the side of the last stitch as shown.

Put the needle in the berry horizontal to where the other side of the stitch is. Hope that makes sense. If not the picture should.

Bring your needle out at the end of the berry. Now you are going to begin to end the thread.

Take your thimble or anything you might have laying around and shove the needle back up into the berry and come out in the middle of the seam somewhere.

Like this.  I didn't like the reboot of the X-Files.

Put your needle back into the seam and bring it back down and out of the tip of the berry.

At the time, X-Files was the longest running sci-fi show ever, nine years. 

I'm full of useless trivia, and a huge geek.

Snip your thread close to the end.

YAY!

BAM!

You are done! Look at you! You have great looking Strawberry Stitches. 

And you learned a bunch of crap about X-Files you didn't know before.