Following a flurry of ideas around the end of last year / beginning of the new year, I decided to be ambitions and start a Quaker Ball project using the patterns from the 2025 Botanical Blackwork SAL by The Steady Thread. Now, Quaker Balls were something I had seen before, but didn't remember exactly how they were put together, so I went Googling to find more information about them. Turns out, the name is a bit of a misnomer.
I found a detailed and informative blog post about them by Sirious Stitches titled Quaker Ball Deep Dive: Cross Stitch Finishing Techniques. From there, I learned that it was a particular design by Denise Harrington Pratt of Amaryllis Artworks called "Quaker Ball" that popularized this construction – and name. The designer named it such because of the Quaker style motifs used. However, the name has stuck, instead, in reference to the way the ball was put together. Sirious Stitches has more information about the origins of the Quaker Ball, so check out their blog post if you want to learn more.
As such, I decided to call my project Blackwork Ball, since I will be stitching blackwork patterns on mine. However, as Quaker Ball is now the common name for these things, I will also be including this name in my posts so they can be found by people searching for Quaker Balls.
For the geometric explanation, what is now known as a Quaker Ball is constructed as a truncated cuboctahedron. Now, that is a mouthful and not easy to remember, so I can see why people don't call it that. It is a polyhedron consisting of 6 octagons, 8 hexagons, and 12 squares, all with the same length edges. As a cross stitch or blackwork piece, these polygons are usually stitched with a backstitch (or, I prefer a double running stitch) outline, and then whip stitched together through the outline stitches. When made of fabric and stuffed, the faces puff out, so the overall shape is more like a ball.
Sirious Stitches also has some outline templates for the polygons in their blog post. However, I wanted a different size, so I made my own. I determined I wanted an edge length of 12 and went from there. I'm sharing my polygon outlines below should you want to stitch a ball of your own using this sizing. You'll need multiples of each shape as listed above, and space for seam allowances between them, so don't use the relative positioning below for your actual stitching. Don't worry about the circle in the hexagon for now; I will explain it later.
For my Blackwork Ball, I am stitching on an opalescent 18 count Aida named Lotus by BeStitchMe and plain white 18 count Aida with one strand of DMC 550. The octagons and hexagons will be on the colored fabric, and the squares will be on the white fabric.
Since the octagons are quite large compared to the squares, I decided to supersize some of the fills from The Steady Thread SAL. By that I mean stitching over 2 Aida blocks instead of the typical 1. It turns out that by doing this, my octagons will be the same width and height as the circles in the SAL. Just the corners are a little different since the circles are more rounded.
For the hexagons, I am planning to stitch a flower motif from the SAL in the center. These will not fit if I stitch them over 2 Aida blocks, so they will be stitched over 1, as typically done on Aida. This, however, leaves more white space than is pleasing to my eye, so I am adding a circle around each flower to take up some of that space. Note that this circle is bigger than the ones in The Steady Thread's patterns. This circle is drawn inside my hexagon outline. If you are stitching something else in the hexagons, you don't need this circle.
For the squares, I wanted some contrast from the other 2 shapes, so originally I planned to stitch the fills over 1 Aida square for more density compared to the octagons. However, I kept getting put off by the plan, since it will be much faster to stitch if I also supersized the fills on the squares. Then, I noticed several examples of Quaker Balls where the squares used a different color fabric. Now that's an easy way to get contrast! So, I found a different color of 18 count Aida to use for the squares, and now I can supersize the fills here too.
Since you probably want to see pretty pictures, here's the start of my first octagon.
