How to Make the Diagonal Cross Stitch

Hi, I’m Jannette. We’re going to be doing the diagonal cross stitches in this segment. If you just take a look at the back of your work, you will notice that you have this very neat little up and down stitches on the back and we can use those to begin a new piece of thread. We’re going to take them and just kind of lightly ran them underneath what is called the floats and then bring it up where we’re going to begin on the other side.

I have not left a long tail here. It’s very short so that it will not show on the front side if it should be lying there. Sometimes leaving long tails will leave a darkness up to here so you’d keep your tails clip close. Okay now, looking at the graph, we’re going to start right up here in this corner and we’re going to work our way down through here. There are eight of these diagonals to the center.

There is a different color in the very center here. This is color 813 and it is shown by a different symbol. So we’re going to do the ones that are 798 and that are the little half-square triangles. So we’ll start off in the upper left hand corner and we’ll start in the lower left hand corner of the square and move to the upper right the same as we have before.

Now, I’m going to be moving to my right. So I want to come over into the upper left hand corner now and I’m going to the lower right hand. When I do the next stitch, I will simply come down to the lower left hand corner and cross to the right. Remember, I am keeping all of my cross stitches going in the same direction.

By this time, it should be getting a little bit easier. You should find it a little more comfortable to work with. By using these methods, we are going to do all four of these diagonal lines. The center of this graph is also worked with diagonal lines. You will notice that the yellow, these little dashes has also worked the same way.

We’ll come back in a minute and we’ll show you how to finish the project.