Cross stitch for the craftily-challenged: any advice?!

[HmmHaa]

Hi all,
I have always secretly wanted to do cross-stitch, and now have a little bit of time on my hands and have decided to give it a go. When I unveil my plan it will be met with gales of laughter as I am, er, not blessed with the creative gene...

Is there a foolproof way to start? All advice welcome. Use small words and short sentences, please

Buy a cross stitch magazine. At a cost of about £4-5 they will give you a project to do at a reasonably low cost. They almost always have a free gift kit on the front and at this time of year they will most likely be something like a Christmas card or two. You'll get full instructions and a chart to follow. The charts have symbols - you can colour over the symbol in a coloured pencil of the same colour as the thread to make it easier to follow.

Some designs use just full stitches. These are the easiest to do although there will be instructions on how to do part stitches in the magazine.

I don't cross stitch much these days and I'm really just a novice anyway so there may be someone along in a minute who has better advice.

In addition to Woolly's good advice I would also say choose a design that has several blocks of colour ( rather than just a few stitches of each colour) and not too many similar colors either. Christmas designs will be good as often just red, green and silver/gold = perfect !
Mark vertical and horizontal lines through the pattern in pencil as well to find the mid point and then mark the same on your canvas ( either by tacking or removable fabric market ) this will allow you to always see where you are in relation to the pattern and also centres your work on the fabric ( learnt from experience on this point ).
Use a ruler to keep place on the pattern
I often photo copy and colour in as well as Wooly suggests.
Enjoy and don't get hung up on going wrong ( no one will ever notice even if you do )

Thank you so much!
Am off to order one now. Someone's going to get very lucky with a wonky Christmas card this year! 😂