I’ve always said that we buy a needlepoint canvas for one of two reasons.

“Oh my God, this looks like so much fun to stitch.”

Or:

“Oh my God, I know exactly where I’m going to put this.”

Maybe you know who you’re going to give it to. Maybe you know exactly where it’s going to hang. Maybe it’s destined to become a pillow for that one chair that has been waiting for exactly the right thing.

Those two reasons aren’t necessarily the same.

But when you find a canvas that does both – the magical center of the Venn diagram – you’ve got gold.

Because “this looks like fun to stitch” makes you want to pick it up and keep stitching. And “I know exactly what I’m going to do with this” gives you a reason to finish it.

But that got me thinking: What actually makes a canvas fun to stitch?

And the answer is different for every one of us.

For some stitchers, it’s a limited color palette. There’s something very satisfying about having a beautifully edited group of threads in front of you and just stitching.

For someone else, it’s large areas where you can settle into a stitch and repeat the pattern over and over again. So many of us started with counted canvas work – myself included – and there’s a particular kind of magic in that. Here’s the diagram. Here’s the pattern. Now off you go.

Think Charley Harper, or Eleanor Grosch from my own line. Big graphic areas. Wonderful shapes. Plenty of room to establish a stitch and let it run.

But that’s not what does it for me.

For me, the fun usually starts with one question:

“What if?”

I look at a canvas and some crazy little idea pops into my head.

What if I did this? What if I put that there? What if I used something that isn’t even technically a needlepoint thread?

That’s when I’m in.

Take Secret Garden. The artwork is flat and graphic and very two-dimensional. Instead of fighting that, I wanted to push it even further – to lean into the graphic quality and make the stitching feel contemporary.

That was the fun.

Or there’s Queen of Tarts by Zecca.

Technically, it’s a queen holding a pie.

And nobody looking at the finished piece is going to magically know that Karen named the canvas Queen of Tarts. But if you know Zecca, you know the quirky titles are part of the joke.

Well, I couldn’t just let the joke sit there in the product name where nobody could see it.

I had to put the joke on the canvas.

So the background became rows of cross-stitched TART ❤️ TART ❤️ TART.

Completely unnecessary.

Also completely necessary.

And that’s what made it fun for me.

Sometimes it’s paper applique. Sometimes it’s Ultrasuede. Sometimes it’s dimensional beadwork that gets stitched separately and attached. Sometimes it’s some ridiculous thing that probably wasn’t manufactured with needlepoint anywhere in its job description.

We’ve even used rubber tubing.

Because apparently I can’t leave well enough alone.

But that’s my version of fun.

Yours might be completely different.

You might look at one of my projects involving seventeen different techniques and think, “Ruth, absolutely not.”

You might be happiest with one gorgeous stitch filling a beautiful large area while your hands learn the rhythm and your brain goes somewhere else.

And that’s exactly the point.

There isn’t a right answer to what makes a canvas fun to stitch.

The trick is figuring out what makes one fun for you.

Do you want repetition? Lots of colors? A challenge? Beads? Texture? Big open areas? Tiny details? Something completely ridiculous that makes you wonder whether it will actually work?

I know my answer.

Give me a canvas that makes me look at it and think:

“What if…?”

That’s the one I want to stitch.