Ready to dive into some stitches that you can use to embellish your needlepoint canvases? Terrific! Me, too. Let’s chat just a minute about stitch families before we get started, though. When you understand how stitches are grouped in families (and how those families relate to each other), it helps make choosing the best ones for your projects much easier. I like to categorize canvas embroidery stitches into these five families: straight, slanted, crossed, looped, and knotted.

Ellen Johnson