In the Cross Stitch community, backs can be a source of pride, an ugly shameful secret, or a glimpse into how another stitcher tackled a piece. I want to preface this post by saying I am firmly in the camp that all backs are beautiful! I don’t think having a knotless back makes you any better of a stitcher, nor does a messy back full of mixed colors and strange jumps means you’re a “bad stitcher”.

The back of Cross stitch pieces will often look different depending on a few things. How many colors you’re using, what kind of effect you want to achieve, and how you prefer to stitch. I’m going to present a few different examples of my pieces, both fronts and backs, and explain why some of my backs look different.

As a reminder, I have trust issues with my stitching so I always tie knots in my floss. Some stitchers frown on this as it means the back will get a bit bulky. It can add bumps to a finished piece, but so far I haven’t noticed this in my work. I assume there are too many wrinkles left after my bad ironing for me to notice

How Does the Cross Stitch Back Look on a Typical Piece?

Usually, the front of your cross stitch is made up of hundreds, if not thousands of crosses. The back usually has vertical or horizontal lines. The back of cross stitch can vary depending on how you stitch however. If you prefer to stitch one color at a time, it will look different than if you stitch by motif or if you are stitching words.

I don’t have access to too many of my finished pieces at the moment. Most of them are in route to Germany and packed up. I’ll try to add more photos to this post as I get more work done on my WIPS or get to unpack work. Here are a few I have examples for however.

Yellow Submarine by Blackbird Designs

This piece a lot of gorgeous over-dyed colors worked up mostly by motif. And here is the back:

Ruler (Soon to be released free pattern)

This is a free pattern I’m working on for a cross-stitched ruler. It only has one color but I used backstitch and petit point in addition to cross-stitch. The back of the piece is pretty neat:

I stitched the outline of the ruler by working half a stitch all around and then completing the stitch on another loop. This is why it looks like there are just the single vertical stitches. Technically those are two stitches overlapped. The backstitch is a single stitch for the half-inch mark. This looks like 2 knots. The numbers were done in half stitch petit point and are easy to see on the back as well.

How Does the Back of Cross Stitch Look for Variegated Floss?

I love variegated floss, so I have many WIPS going with it. Sometimes it takes some special stitching to get the effect you want too. On this lovely apocalyptic skull piece from Screaming Heart Design, I used Cosmo 8XXX, a very quickly variegating floss. 

This floss changes between blue, purple, and pink in quick succession, so I have been working this almost exclusively in full crosses. You can see this from my back, where you can see the design almost as clearly as on the front. If I decided to stitch in rows or columns, I would have much “neater” backs, but the floss colors would be more mixed, and the contrast wouldn’t be as bright as this way of stitching creates. 

In contrast to that, my WIP “Home Sweet Home” from Modern Folk Embroidery has a much more muted red being used. I decided to work this up in Indian Summer by Weeks Dye Works. The color changes are less frequent and less different, so I often stitch 4-5 in one direction before returning. I think this is really evident in the roof of the house. 

The house has “bricks” made up of 3 vertical stitches which look like nice little horizontal dashes on the back. I worked up a row of bricks in one direction, then worked another row of vertical bricks back. Every 3 rows this resulted in me having a row of “backstitch” along the back of my piece due to keeping my stitches in the same direction. The effect is pretty, but ultimately I stitched it this way as I found this the easiest way to not lose count or waste too much thread.

So there are four examples of cross stitch backs. I’ll look for some of my other pieces to post when I get my hands on them again. As is I probably packed too much cross stitching to bring with me to Germany, but is there really such a thing as too much cross stitch supplies?

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