Learning How to Stitch Paint Needlepoint Projects

Needlepoint is one of those hobbies that can be expensive and time consuming; between buying the canvases, the thread, the finishing, and all of the little knick-knacks that go along with feeling and looking the part, the cost can really add up. Don’t get me wrong – if I see a cute canvas from an existing needlepoint store, you can bet your bottom dollar that I’m going to snatch it up, stitch it up, and put it to good use or decoration in our house. But part of me always wondered that maybe I could start to learn how to make canvases from scratch, and if the project wasn’t too difficult or meant to be used heavily, maybe I could also learn how to finish them, saving myself money and time.

This is where I learned the art of stitch painting. Relative to needlepoint projects, stitch painting is essentially where you paint the intersection of the canvas’ mesh with a specific color to contribute to an overall picture that gets painted onto a canvas to be eventually sewn and finished via needlepoint. I had never done this before, but I’ve stitched enough canvases in my 32 years to know what a good needlepoint canvas looks like, so I decided to give it a try. Turns out it is not as easy as it looks, and there are a few things I did learn along the way. So while I can’t offer you readers a full on tutorial of how to stitch paint just yet, I can offer some tips and tricks that I will be using in all of my future projects where I do a needlepoint canvas from soup to nuts.

1. Start with good mesh canvas
   • If you’ve done a few needlepoint projects, you’ll start to know when a canvas feels high quality and easy to work with (i.e. is flexible without crunching and breaking, has evenly spaced holes for the needle and thread to go through, etc.). The right canvas will also save you at least a few hours when it comes to painting the canvas, because you won’t have to go over the stitches so many times in order for the color to stick. I used this canvas for my first two stitch painting projects, but I think I will try another one for my next project where the mesh is slightly closer together (just a personal preference), but it worked well for my first projects.
2. The right brushes are trial and error situation
   • The next step was finding brushes to work with that I could use to put the images in my brain on to the canvas with relative ease. Because stitch painting is such a precise technique, the concept of simply sweeping your brush over the canvas to achieve your vision doesn’t quite apply, and you’ll need to find a set of brushes that are on the shorter side, have tight bristles, and won’t glob up too much when you’re applying more paint to the brush. I used this set from Amazon as a first try, but I ended up only really using one or two from the set – the others were too long and not suitable for stitch painting in my opinion. The two that I did use however, worked very well, the only caveat being that I did have to apply quite a few coats of paint to the canvas in order for the color to show, but that might have more to do with the thickness of the canvas. Food for thought.
3. Get a lap desk
   • After my first stitch painting session where I was hunched over my living room coffee table and sitting on the floor in order to have my face only centimeters from the canvas in order to achieve maximum precision, I decided that this was not a sustainable for my aging back. I got this lap desk to allow for a much more comfortable sitting position while painting, and have zero regrets about it. It also comes in handy when I’m doing work at my computer on the couch or even at my desk when I need to be more at eye level.
4. Work off of a stencil – unless you have an incredible photographic memory
   • Even if you are stitch painting something that you feel you know by heart, it is very easy to go cross-eyed and get lost in the sea of mesh when you’re trying to achieve maximum precision on your canvas by painting mesh cross-section after mesh cross-section. Do yourself a favor and get some good tracing paper and painters tape that you can use to create your image on first, and then tape to the back of your canvas to guide you as you paint your image. Either that or make sure you have good readers, but my eye sight is already beyond that at this point.
5. Flowers are hard
   • …per my suggestion above, do not attempt to paint flowers from memory. While lillies are my favorite flowers and I feel confident that I could draw one from memory using a paper and pencil, stitch painting one onto a canvas requires much more detail and color gradation than I could achieve on my first try, so I had to go back over my painting several times with different colors variations before it even remotely resembled a lily.

At the end of it all, I found stitch painting to be quite cathartic and therapeutic, much in the same way that needlepoint is, and I had a tremendous amount of pride and satisfaction in creating my own projects entirely from scratch. Seeing your creations come to life and being used in real life is such a gratifying process, so I am looking forward to seeing what other projects I can come up with for use around the house and beyond!

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