Book Review: 100 Mini Cross Stitch Designs

There are a lot of fun, large and challenging cross stitch designs out there, but sometimes you just want something small and simple. Little cross stitch designs are great to use on greeting cards, bookmarks, napkins and other projects, and though they don’t take a long time to stitch they are still a lot of fun.

100 Mini Cross Stitch Designs by Rosemary Drysdale has a wide range of wee designs, including holiday and seasonal designs, natural elements like mushrooms and flowers, objects like school buses and sushi, just to name a few.

The patterns are presented in full color charts that are large and easy to read. Some of the patterns are shown in projects such as a pillow covered with bees and a hive or a set of rockets framed separately to decorate a kid’s room. You can use these ideas as a jumping off point to design your own gift tags, embellished clothing or whatever else you like.

If you love cross stitch but also enjoy the instant gratification of small projects, this book is a must have!

About the book: 160 pages, paperback, 100 patterns. Published in February 2022 by GMC Publications. Suggested retail $24. Buy on Amazon.

I was recently doing a scroll through some crafting websites that I follow and I came across this amazing collection of cross stitch job patterns from Koekoek. It includes more than 100 different jobs, sports and hobbies, and these would be so much fun to personalize and stitch up for friends, family and co-workers.

You’ll find everything from occupations like doctor, fireman, maternity nurse, tax lawyer and librarian to sports like swimming, fishing and beach volleyball.

There’s pattern for watching marathon amounts of Netflix, doing triathlons (basically the same thing, right?), teaching geography, graphic design and catching Pokemon. Among many others.

The designs are categorized by medical professions, office jobs, stitch a sport (which includes other hobbies) and education professions, or you can just scroll through all the patterns to see the variety. Check out all the designs on their website, or scroll down on this page to see them in categories and with more details.

They suggest working these with a five inch hoop using 14 count cross stitch fabric or 28 count evenweave stitched over two threads for a fancier look. The number of colors needed for each design varies, but they are pretty small projects so there’s generally not a ton of detail.

The patterns also include text for what the image is showing like “the knitter” or “the veterinarian,” but they also have a post about how to personalize the designs with different text such as the person’s name, a date or a quote. There’s also a full bask stitch alphabet included in the post so you can chart out your own text.

And while the designs show specific people, you can change up details like hair color, clothing color and eye color if you want to make it look more like the person you intend to give it to. You can also purchase custom cross stitch kits from them to make the project exactly the way you want it without having to do the work yourself.

I think this is such a fun idea for a graduation gift or a holiday gift. If you check it out I’d love to know which characters you are stitching!

[Photo: Koekoek]

Have you read?