Book Review: Cross Stitch Celebrations Bundle of Joy!

Many crafters like to use their skills to make gifts for new babies, and when it comes to cross stitch, making a stitched birth announcement is a classic.

These projects often include the baby’s name along with information like date of birth and sometimes time of birth, weight and height. There’s often a cute animal or some other design included.

They’re very personal projects, and there’s a lot to think about if you’re making one for your little one or a baby you know. Mollie Johanson covers the basics of designing, planning and stitching cross stitch baby announcements, with lots of options for you to choose from, in her book Cross Stitch Celebrations: Bundle of Joy!

The beginning of the book covers the basics of cross stitch and then goes into a lot of detail about how you might approach designing your own cross stitch birth announcement. It shows how to sketch out your design on paper so you know how everything fits together and how big it will be before you start stitching. There are also tips on choosing colors, placement of designs and how to change the patterns shown in the book.

After these instructions you’ll find more than 20 options for your project, including baby animals like bears, bunnies, elephants and owls; border patterns such as leaves, scallops, gingham and chevrons; and little motifs you can sprinkle into your projects like hearts, rainbows and paw prints.

Then there are four alphabets to choose from, including tips on placement and spacing.

Finally you’ll find a design gallery with finished projects and instructions on how to make them. The options are a framed announcement, a hoop that’s an animal and the baby’s name, and an announcement attached to a canvas with no frame (the one shown is for twins, which is nice to see as an option if you aren’t sure how to do that but need it).

Each pattern is shown with the colors she used and has a chart as well as written instructions and a photo of the finished design. These are all just jumping off points for stitchers to make their own projects for the little ones in their lives.

Cross Stitch Celebrations: Bundle of Joy! is full of cute ideas for stitchers of all skill levels to make pretty birth announcements and other cross stitch projects for baby.

About the book: 96 pages, paperback. Published 2022 by Walter Foster Publishing. Suggested retail price $19.99.

I’ve done embroidery on paper before and it’s a lot of fun. You can use a needle to punch out a particular shape to stitch, or my favorite thing is to take a copy of an old photograph or a page from a magazine and add stitched details to the original picture.

One thing I haven’t tried but would also be fun to do is cross stitching on paper.

This is a technique that requires a fair amount of preparation because you need to find a pattern you can easily transfer and print it at actual size, then use the pattern itself to help you decide where to put the holes in your paper. And then after all that you can do your stitching.

It’s a pretty straightforward process, but Crewel Ghoul has a great tutorial that walks you through how to do it step by step. It even includes a sample pattern you can print out and try for practice.

The post also has tips for starting and finishing your threads so that the back looks as neat as it can, if that’s something that’s important to you. (When I have done embroidery on paper I usually just tape the thread end to the back. If the back were going to show I’d probably just cover it with more paper.)

Stitching on paper is a fun way to make bookmarks or greeting cards, but you also need to make sure your paper is thick enough to support the holes you’ll be making in it. This post has a good rundown of materials you’ll need and what kind of paper is best. She used watercolor paper but I’ve used card stock and scrapbook paper that was a little thicker than the average printer paper.

You can always test a little on the paper you’re considering to make sure it will stand up to the project.

Check out the post, which includes a video, over at Crewel Ghoul for more tips for cross stitching on paper. Is this something you’ve tried before? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo: Crewel Ghoul]

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