British Cross Stitch Magazines

I have a vast collection of British cross stitch magazines.  Most of them are in storage in Wisconsin, which makes them impossible to access, since I live in Saint Louis.   My favorites are Cross Stitch Crazy and Cross Stitch Card Shop.  Some of the other British cross stitch magazines, such as Cross Stitcher, don't appeal to me.   If I want a big design, I don't want one that is stitched on Aida in whole stitches, with tons of backstitching just to define the edges.  That is why, for big designs, I prefer charts from, say, the US or France or Ireland, and I stitch them on hand-dyed linen.  I don't do kits, either.  There are a lot of references to kits in British magazines.  I don't understand kits.  I don't understand why all the threads are not already sorted and labeled in some kits (Dimensions kits would drive me crazy for this reason), or why the fabric pieces are always so skimpy and almost always white, or why they use boring brands of thread rather than hand-dyed thread, which I prefer.  I do like Cross Stitch Crazy and Card Shop because the designs in them are small.  I don't mind stitching something on Aida in entirely whole stitches with cheap thread if it's something small and quick, although small and quick for some of the designs in these magazines means up to 50 hours.   They do have "one nighters" which for me would take a week because I just can't sit down and stitch for four or five hours straight -- unless it's Monday and I have an iPod full of new podcasts I could listen to for hours on end.   If I could read and stitch at the same time, that would make me happy.  Okay, so I could (and do) download Audible.com books and listen to those.  That kind of multi-tasking would make me happy.

So back to the British cross stitch magazines.  They are fun to look at.  They are fun to read.  Sometimes I find nothing in them I would want to stitch, but there's a lot more in them than designs.  They are almost cross stitch gossip magazines.   They're very entertaining and fun.

I get my British cross stitch magazines from the racks at Barnes & Noble.  The only problem with buying them at Barnes & Noble is that oftentimes some idiot cheap stitcher will have already stolen the free gift out of the plastic wrapper.  It's not that I really want the free gift (I almost never use them), but it does take some of the fun out of it.   It's important to check that the free gift is still in there when buying the magazines sold in wrappers.  

Now I'm off to fantasize about stitching silly little designs in the latest issue of Cross Stitch Crazy.