Hi guys! I'm wondering if I can pick your brains a little bit, is that ok?
So my 3 year old loves to sew and can handsew, use the sewing machine, the embroidery machine and even the overlocker which some serious supervision! Mostly she uses a whip stitch when hand sewing, I think a half cross stitch would be the next easiest thing for her to learn, so I'm wanting to put together a small embroidery kit for her using just halfstitch. Does anyone know of any really BASIC patterns? Something with at most 3 colours and really quick and easy. She has ADHD and is 3 so if it's too complicated or too simple she won't enjoy it.
She's a nature child and we'll probably wind up doing this under a tree mid hike somewhere when her little legs need a rest as we're rarely indoors these days so something like a tree or a leaf or something we might find while on our walk would be amazing! Sadly, I haven't properly stitched in four years now and I've forgotten where to look!
If you go to dmc.com and select "Patterns" and then sort by "Free Cross Stitch patterns" they have quite a number of what I consider "a-couple-of-hours" patterns that are very uncomplicated with a small number of colors and would take a novice stitcher maybe a couple of hours (hence my devilishly clever nickname) to complete. If you want to have her do them in half stitches, I'd suggest no smaller than 14-count aida (probably more like 9 or 10-count) and maybe four strands of floss to get decent coverage
Oh! Look at the amount of space stuff they have for free!!!! My kid wants to be an astronaut when she's big! Thank you for the suggestion, I have a dog and a planets one that say they're beginner friendly. I'm going to get her some Binca and use my fabric pencil to actually draw the designs onto that for her so she can focus on learning the stitch before we work on reading the pattern
Binca needles might be good, too -- not from a sharp point of view, but from a size and grip-ability one. And if 4 strands (or even 6) of regular floss becomes difficult to manage, what about pearl cotton 5? I'm pretty sure that'd work with Binca and not become a tangled mess.
When I was a 6yo brat my school did a bit of needlework. It was all on 6 count Aida using large blunt needles. The floss we used was straight off the skein, so must have been 6 threads.
40 years later I remembered that, and it was what convinced me to try cross stitch again when I was trying to avoid going out into a sub-zero workshop (sub zero centigrade, not Fahrenheit, I was in the UK!) and wanted to do something with the family in the living room.
Keep us posted on her progress.
