This post was originally in XStitch Magazine Issue 16: Cute, and has been adapted.

When I first heard this issue was going to be titled “cute” my heart sank a bit. That isn’t to say there aren’t some truly great cute patterns out there, or even that I don’t do cute things myself, after all, I’m a designer of officially licensed Hello Kitty and Disney cross stitch kits. But instead, my heart sank due to the way cute cross stitch is seen by the non-stitchers of the world.

As a manbroiderer when I used to say I cross stitched, people always gave the same shocked reply “the granny hobby?” And, whilst time has moved on and this is no longer the stock reply (in Britain at least), they now come up with a different response; “the cute little stitches?”.

This in itself is fine, they don’t know better. These patterns have been a significant part of the craft for a long time, and unless you’re a cross stitcher or embroiderer, you’re unlikely to find the less cute stuff. But I find it disheartening when all you see on social media are really great, usually not-cute cross stitch, yet we’re still know as those stitchers of cute motifs. In essence this is unintentional propaganda driven by what general people think they know of cross stitch.

But that got me thinking; maybe we’re also pushing propaganda around. And in fact, we are. And unlike the cute cross stitch idea, we’re spreading actual propaganda around. We just don’t know it’s propaganda.

The fact that you’re reading this means you are almost definitely from an ex-British Empire colony, or from a neighboring country. As a result, when I ask for the history of cross stitch you’re all going to give me the same story.
Embroidery made its way across the silk road, before Catherine of Aragon brought it to England. From here it sailed across the seas to the far corners of the British Empire.
It’s a nice story, it can be summed up quickly, and it feels like it could be true. This is where the problems start though. For a start, it’s not true!

It does have its basis in truth, and Catherine of Aragon was super important to the story of cross stitch, however this story would be like trying to describe the history of aviation without mentioning wings; it misses massive amounts out. But this is far from the only issue with the story.

We’ll start by correcting this story before we start embellishing it with more facts. Catherine of Aragon was a Spanish Princess, who married into the British royal family in 1509. Part of her schooling was needlework, and she brought that with her to Britain. But here’s the kicker; there is no evidence of cross stitch being part of that.
In fact, looking back through English history, it’s a different British Queen, some 60 years later that loved cross stitch. Without Catherine of Aragon bringing embroidery to Britain, we wouldn’t have seen cross stitch, so she is super important, but the story of her bringing it to the modern world is just plain wrong.

So why do we still push that story? Simple; the British disliked the Germans. That might be a little simplistic, but in the 11th to 17th century Britain started feeling Germany’s influence. Many of the traders across the Northern coast of Britain were German, and Germany produced wools at the same quality of Britain. As a result, when embroidery came to Britain with Catherine of Aragon, the royal family had to bolster the idea of buying British fabrics and wool instead of German.

In reality, cross stitch was alive and well in Germany at this time, well before Britain started to see it. And here’s the second issue; the story is a very British centric view. Fast forwarding time by over 350 years since Mary Queen of Scots stitched the Oxburgh Hangings, we arrive in the Victorian times. The relationship with Germany has improved massively, and Albert (married to Queen Victoria) was German royalty. But Britain had really grown.

The British Empire started to develop during this time, with the East India Company taking control of many countries on earth to expand their profits, influence and control. This, is where the propaganda mill really gets going.

The British Empire was responsible for pushing cross stitch out to the corners of its Empire and without it, you wouldn’t be cross stitching. But it was during this period that British propaganda took control of many narratives across the world. In Victorian England, “everything the sun touched was British” and that meant needlework and embroidery too. Even if they had to play with the truth.

As I mentioned earlier, cross stitch in Germany was alive and well decades before Britain was involved. Catherine of Aragon was a Spanish princess, and cross stitch has been seen in Spain then too. But moving earlier there are cross stitch examples from Hungary, Tunisia, Egypt, Scandinavia, China, Japan, Palestine, Italy, Ukraine and beyond hundreds of years before. Britain was actually late to the party.

These countries all have their own histories, and cross stitch plays a part in each. For example Ukrainian embroidery and cross stitch goes back to 500BC, being integral to religious festivals. But the story we all know and tell seems to forget this existed. In reality the history of cross stitch is a messy one, and depending on the country you’re speaking about can vary massively too.

The cross stitch history story we all know and tell, is simply that; a story. It does sounds nice, it does have some truth in it, but it also forgets about the work of cross stitchers across the world. Without their designs, and their own histories, we wouldn’t have anywhere near the depth of options.

So what does this have to do with “cute”? Well the first cross stitch examples to include cute motifs were Egyptian, the German cross stitchers then added these into many samplers, where they moved away from realistic images and more cute. We owe cute cross stitch to a history we don’t tell. We owe it to the Egyptians and the Germans that don’t feature in the story. And we don’t know, because we spread propaganda (all be it without knowing it)!

Happy stitching!
Lord Libidan