Book Review: Cross Stitch Flowers

May 1, 2025 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

The Dover Pocketbook Collection book Cross Stitch Flowers is a collection of floral designs by Gerda Bengtosson, reflecting the handworks of the Danish embroidery tradition. Haandarbejdets Fremme, known elsewhere as Danish Design, was a movement begun in 1928 to preserve and promote embroidery in the country.

The book includes 26 charts and a section on materials and basic instructions. The patterns are shown in a color chart on one page and include a thread palette and section for notes on the opposite page. The general descriptions of colors are used, such as dull blue green or earth color, rather than giving a DMC number or the code from a different thread company. This does allow you more wiggle room to use what you have but you may not necessarily end up with the same look the designer was going for.

That doesn’t really matter, though, and there are no photos of the finished stitched designs, just the charts, so it’s easy to go your own way and choose whatever colors you like. (There’s also space in the palette or in the notes section where you could write down the colors you use in case you want to duplicate the design in the future.)

The charts are large and have dark lines every 10 stitches or rows doe ease in reading. They look hand colored, and they only use full stitches so they should be relatively easy to stitch even though some of them are big. It would have been nice for the patterns to say approximately how big the finished design would be on different sizes of fabric so you know what you’re getting into without having to do the math yourself.

The patterns show a variety of flowers, from common plants like daisies and dandelions to snow gentian, plantain and Iceland poppy, to name a few. Most designs have around 8-10 different colors.

I feel like a lot of stitchers would want to see stitched versions of projects before they start stitching, but if you’re OK with just looking at the chart to decide what you want to stitch, this is a nice collection of floral patterns to stitch and a bare-bones book that allows you to focus on the charts without a lot of frills.

About the book: 64 pages, paperback, 26 patterns. Published 2025 by Dover Publications. Suggested retail price $9.99.

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35+ Sunflower Cross Stitch Patterns

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Minecraft Cross Stitch Patterns

With a new Minecraft movie out in theaters, it seems like a great time to share some Minecraft cross stitch patterns. I’ve never known much about Minecraft but I know a lot of people love it, so let’s see what I found.

Of course because it has an 8-bit style it’s easy to translate to cross stitch patterns and remain pretty faithful to the original look of the game. Like with these little designs from Lab Pattern. The information on the photo and in the listing don’t match, but I think the listing is correct based on my attempt to count pixels in the photo, which would make the full set 55 by 48 stitches. That’s 3.93 by 3.43 inches/9.98 by 8.71 cm on 14 count fabric. It uses 22 colors.

This pixel poster from Mushroom Moon XStitch is a Minecraft and Pokemon mashup featuring the animals of Minecraft. It measures 134 by 198 stitches, or 9.57 by 14.14 inches/24.3 by 40 cm on 14 count fabric (the pattern includes counts for finer fabric, too, if you want to make it smaller). It uses 21 colors.

There’s a whole rainbow of colors in the Minecraft world, as shown in this design from Fizzikyu. This 200 by 200 stitch pattern uses 87 colors, so it’s not really a project for a beginner but it would be a great one to stitch for a Minecraft fan.

Speaking of the wide world of Minecraft, you can stitch it all, from the surface to the underground and the nether, with this design from Arcane Pigeon converted to cross stitch by Glitch Stitch AU. This design uses 39 colors and measures 100 by 300 stitches, or 21.5 by 7.25 inches/54.4 by 18.1 cm on 14 count fabric. What a stunner for a game room!

Little X Stitch Pattern has a set of six Minecraft character cross stitch patterns, which you can stitch individually or as a set on one piece of fabric. Each individual character is around 35 by 35 stitches (except for the wolf, not shown here), so they come out around 2.5 inches/6.3 cm on 14 count fabric.

One of the most famous creatures from Minecraft is the axolotl, of course, and you can stitch up a cross stitch Minecraft style axolotl with this design from Palatable Patterns. This is the rare blue axolotl, but you can make it another color if you like (today I learned axolotls in Minecraft can be pink, brown, gold, cyan or blue). The pattern is 75 by 75 stitches.

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