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.

Mason jars are fun to craft with, use for storage or even use to hold gifts like baking mixes or sugar scrubs. But you can make your jars even cuter — no matter what you’re using them for — by adding a bit of cross stitch to the lid.

This idea comes from Gathered, and while they are showing examples of Mason jars used for storage in the craft room, you can use these throughout the house. I’m also thinking you could do this as a way to fancy up a traditional Mason jar sewing kit, since there’s already a little batting under the piece of cross stitch you could still use it as a pincushion.

The post walks you through how to make a cross stitched Mason jar lids and a link to a PDF pattern that includes six design options.

They’re not totally for beginners because they include cross stitch, backstitch, eyelets and Rhodes stitch, but if you aren’t familiar with those techniques you can either leave them off or there’s a stitch diagram in the PDF to help you.

Either way these designs are cute and relatively quick to stitch in whatever colors you like. It’s easy to turn them into jar toppers, or you could even just use the Mason jar ring as a frame rather than using it on top of a jar (I did this with a little Christmas tree cross stitch pattern I turned into an ornament).

They’re super cute in the pastel colors shown, or work in red and green for more of a holiday look if you’re using them for gift giving.

Check out the instructions and grab the free patterns for these jar toppers at Gathered. Once you start stitching I’m sure you’ll come up with all sorts of things you want to store or gift in jars so that you can make more of them!

[Photo: Gathered]

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