NORBAG August Workshop - Kris Nevius and the X Stitch Books

Kris Nevius drove up From Graton (near Sebastopol/Santa Rosa) to teach our members Keith Smith's various X Stitch bindings. By providing templates, we were able to sew the correct sequence by following the numbers and letters with Kris guiding us. This practice gave us the confidence to then use different patterns on our subsequent two books.

Kris is showing the spine stitch when finished.

Kris is piercing the spine. The spine has two rows of piercing
 so that each signature will have its own attachment.

Kris piercing the signatures using a piercing cradle.

 Kris made sample boards for us to practice each of the stitches before we began. We used two basic piercing patterns. The one on the right is the more straight forward. The needle would start in Signature A and then move to B. Where the threads crossed in the middle, they could simply cross, wrap or loop giving different stitches. On the right, you can see each of the possibilities. The left set gives an offset batch of holes again with the possibility of simply crossing, twisting, or looping. 

The first stitches were awkward to hold. Once the first two X's were complete, the holes lined up more easily and we then moved to our second and third books using a different stitching pattern each time.

Examples of our work:

Please note, one of our members came up with this variation during the workshop.

Look closely and you will see several stitch variations on the same book.

This book has a variation that uses all 4 holes with stitching directly across
resulting in a bar with the lower stitch looping over the upper bar.

We were busy.

The book on the far right has a linked stitch with a different tension
on the stitching resulting in a bow-like look.

The pink book has a combination of bars and X stitches.

Kris made these in different sizes and put closures on them for notebooks.

Many thanks to Kris for her fantastic workshop. She included wonderful handouts and instructions. It was especially interesting to see how varied this stitch can be. We came away feeling very accomplished! We hope to see this binding in future exchange books.