How To Take Care Of Your Hands When Cross Stitching

If you’re an avid cross stitcher like me, then you know how hard it can be at times to keep your hands healthy and working at their best. Nothing is worse than having a skin condition or pain that causes you to have put down your crafting projects for days or weeks at a time.

Keep Them Clean

We all know that we need to clean our hands prior to working on any type of cross stitching project. Nothing is worse than transferring dirt or a food stain directly onto your cross stitching fabric or floss when it’s something that is so easily prevented.

Don’t forget your nails! Cleaning under your fingernails regularly and keeping the nails themselves trimmed and the edges smoothed will help prevent many issues when stitching.

Moisturizing To Prevent Problems

This is my biggest complaint about my own hands. I live in a very dry climate and use my hands all day long for work and for stitching. It’s very easy for my hands to get too dry.

Here are some tips on how to prevent and treat dry hands:

• Stay hydrated! Drink plenty of water to hydrate your skin from the inside to the outside.
• Moisturizing with a cream or a lotion designed to soak in thoroughly and quickly will help give your skin the nutrients needed to stay soft and smooth. If your moisturizer leads a residue on your hands you will need to wash them before you start stitching.
• Wear gloves in your daily activities when you need to! Whether you’re a construction worker or just gardening in your backyard, wear gloves to protect your hands when you need to!
• Stay away from hand sanitizers when possible! While alcohol-based solutions can be a great way to disinfect your hands, they can also overly dry your hands if you use them often.
• Along those lines, be mindful of the facial cleansers you use daily! If you’re using a cleanser designed to treat oily skin you may be inadvertently damaging your hands at the same time!
• Need a deeper treatment? Consider a weekly hand “mask.” This is a technique you can use to moisturize your hands deeply while you sleep! Just apply your favorite hand moisturizer to your hands right before going to bed and putting on a special pair of gloves designed to keep the moisturizer from drying out overnight!

How To Prevent Pain In Your Hands While Cross Stitching

Maybe you’re in a situation where you’ve had pain in your hands or fingers on a chronic basis and stitching tends to bring that pain back. You could also simply be getting older and stitch so much that you’re worried you’re going to develop a condition that can cause pain.

What are some of the most common causes of pain for stitchers?

• Arthritis
• Trigger finger
• Carpal Tunnel

Arthritis

You don’t have to be older to suffer from arthritis. Any prior damage to a joint can affect the cartilage enough to result in arthritis. I had arthritis in my knees in my early 30’s due to genetics and an active athletic history.

How does one get early arthritis in their hands or fingers? Prior fractures or other trauma are likely the most common issue. You could also have a condition like lupus or rheumatoid arthritis that makes your fingers or hands hurt.

Trigger Finger

Trigger finger is a condition where the tendon sheath of a finger(s) becomes so inflamed that the finger will literally “lock” in one position. This can be due to overuse of one particular finger because of work or a particular hobby.

Not only is this disabling but it’s also painful. In some cases surgery may be needed to correct and alleviate the condition. Both my mom and my grandfather had trigger finger of the thumb

Carpal Tunnel

Whereas trigger finger is inflammation of the t2endon sheath of one or more fingers, carpal tunnel syndrome is inflammation of the entire wrist tendon sheath.

I wrote an article a while back about whether or not cross stitching can predispose a person to carpal tunnel syndrome. My feelings are that it doesn’t in most cases, but if you suffer from the condition stitching can be very uncomfortable.

While surgery can alleviate and correct this painful issue, there are ways to prevent this from coming on in the first place. We will discuss these issues below.

Treating And Preventing Hand Pain In Cross Stitching

Don’t let hand pain stop you from your love of cross stitching if you can help it! Because of my work, I’ve abused my hands and fingers quite a lot over the years. In dealing with those issues, I’ve come up with some great ways to help my hands feel better.

• Keep your fingers and hands as flexible as possible! Take time throughout the day to make it a habit to stretch your fingers and wrists. This means spreading your fingers as far out and wide as possible both on your own and using a flat surface to bend them further. Rotate your wrists and rub them and your forearms regularly, especially if you’re using your hands heavily.
• Look into getting a massage ball for your hands to help keep them even more limber and feeling good! This spiky massage ball was intended for some foot pain I was having, but now I use it daily on my hands by just holding it and rolling it back and forth. For someone who has had carpal tunnel surgery, this spiky ball really works into those old scars well.
• Ice your hands when you need to! We all rush to put ice on a swollen toe or knee, but we tend to not reach for the ice when our hands are hurting. Maybe it’s because we just don’t want to put our phones down, but icing the hands is a great treatment for chronic and acute pain.
• Take a break!! Just because you’re mentally capable of stitching for hours on end doesn’t mean that your hands and fingers have to do that. Your back and your neck will thank you as well if you get up every hour just to stretch and walk around a little.

This is just a brief overview of the ways you can treat your skin and hands to keep them at their very best. Do you have a method or product that you love and think works well? Let us know down in the comments!

Conclusion

If you’re as addicted to cross stitching as I am, your hands and fingers are your most important tools. Keep them healthy and happy and you’ll be cross stitching for years to come!