A Bunch of Mini Cat Cross Stitch Patterns

I know that I have shared a few of these individual patterns before, but if you’re a fan of cats and cross stitch I wanted to make sure you knew about the whole bunch of mini cat cross stitch patterns that are available from Happiness is Cross Stitching.

In all there are 24 different cats, with one for each month of the year as well as some seasonal and holiday ones. A few holidays repeat like Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day and Christmas, but it’s always good to have options, right?

Since St. Patrick’s Day is coming up soon I wanted to share this one, which is a little black cat wearing a hat and green collar with a shamrock on its tail. It looks like the pattern would use two colors (three if you want to make the eyes and nose white) and the actual stitching area is less than 30 by 30, co it wouldn’t take all that long to stitch. There’s a little bit of back stitching for the whiskers and shamrock stem, but this would be a great project for a new stitcher to try.

As I mentioned above, there’s also a cat for every month of the year if you want to make a sampler or stitch a topper for a little printed calendar. Or you could take the cats from those monthly patterns and use them in other projects.

These are super cute as gift tags or on cards, or there are some shown as little pillows if you like that look. The great thing about minis is that you can use them a bunch of different ways. A

And of course these cats are black, but you could easily change the coloring to make it look more like a cat in your life if you don’t happen to be lucky enough to have a black cat.

You can find all the charts — and some ideas of what to do with them — at Happiness is Cross Stitching.

[Photo: Happiness is Cross Stitching]

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Unique St. Patrick's Day Cross Stitch Patterns

I love the look of variegated cross stitch floss and how it makes it possible to stitch with a variety of colors without changing thread, giving your project more depth and a more complex look without you having to do anything different.

Or at least not much different. I recently came across this blog post from The Copper Fox all about how to use variegated floss and it noted that many people would say it’s a good idea to complete a whole stitch (when you’re stitching whole cross stitches) with the floss before going on to the next stitch. Most of us stitch row by row, but of course if you do that with variegated yarn, it could change color along the way and you’ll end up with stitches that are half one color and half another color or a different shade.

Of course that makes total sense but I’d never thought about it.

The post includes swatches with different kinds of variegated threads to show the different between working stitch by stitch or row by row, and it doesn’t make a huge different over the small area shown but I can see how it might make a difference if you had really long rows or if you just want to make sure your stitches are a single color whenever possible.

In addition to this experiment, the post talks about other ways to work with multicolored floss, including deliberately mixing the colors among the strands of floss you are stitching with and stitching in a different order instead of right to left and top to bottom (or whatever direction you typically work) to get different effects from the thread.

It’s fun to geek out on this stuff because it can make a difference if you want to play with it, or you can just stitch on without giving it much thought, and both will give you good results.

Check out all the experiments at The Copper Fox.

Do you do anything different when you stitch with variegated floss? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo: The Copper Fox]

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