A Butterfly Bookmark for Your Summer Reading

I love summer for a lot of reasons, but this particular summer has been great because my daughter is old enough to read by herself, which means I’m getting a lot more reading time for books I actually want to read (not that I don’t love reading to her, and I still do a lot, but grown-up books are nice, too).

We are always in need of more bookmarks, and crafty bookmarks are 1,000 times better than your grocery store receipt, right?

Here’s a great free butterfly bookmark cross-stitch pattern from Happy Stitches. She also has a version of the pattern in a square if you’d rather have a square of butterflies for some other reason.

Either way, it uses nine colors and is easy to customize with whatever colors you want your butterflies to be.

Happy stitching and reading!

[Photo: Happy Stitch.]

Looking for more Bookmark charts and cross-stitch patterns? Check these out on Etsy

Looking for more Butterfly themed cross stitch patterns and charts? Check out these butterflies we found on Etsy.

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30 Bookmarks To Cross Stitch For Kids

When you put all the time and energy you do into making a great cross stitch project, it’s worth taking the time to frame it in a way that will make it look its best.

Often for smaller designs we’ll choose to frame projects in a hoop, which is cute and a fine option, especially for seasonal projects you might want to change out through the year. Others will send their finished projects for professional framing, which is a great option for gifts and heirloom items that need to be preserved, but it can also be quite expensive.

Crewel Ghoul has a great tutorial for a way that you can easily frame your cross stitch projects at home with just a few supplies.

She uses adhesive mounting board (but you can use non-adhesive board if you have some one hand or you need a size that’s not available in an adhesive version) and a few other basic supplies to secure the sides and corners of the cross stitch fabric around the board before putting the design in the frame.

This requires a bit of hand sewing, but we’re cross stitchers so I’m sure we can handle that.

Framing your cross stitch like this gives it a little padding in the frame, which makes it look better than if it were just flat in a frame with no special finishing. It’s also a great idea to use a frame without glass or to leave the glass out of the frame so it doesn’t crush your stitches.

And though this is super secure it’s not 100 percent permanent if you decide you don’t want the project framed in that way any more. Or you can take it out of the frame and the edges are still all nicely finished so you can display it a different way without having to do anything else to it.

Check out the tutorial at Crewel Ghoul.

[Photo: Crewel Ghoul.]

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