Book Review: Holiday Ornaments Galore

Still looking for some holiday decor to stitch up or a gift for your favorite cross-stitcher? Check out Holiday Ornaments Galore, a book from Leisure Arts with a whopping 98 designs on all sorts of holiday themes.

Here you’ll find cutesy snowmen, elves and gingerbread people; stockings, ornament motifs and wreath designs; text sentiments, animals, Santas and more.

The projects are all designed by Urusla Michael and they are show in a numbered, full-color project gallery at the front of the book, with corresponding numbered charts in the back. Basic stitching instructions appear at the front of the book to help new stitchers or give you a refresher on any needed skills (the patterns use full stitches, quarter stitches, back stitches and French knots).

You can download the ebook from Leisure Arts or order a paper copy.

[Photo: Leisure Arts.]

One of the easiest ways to make a cross stitch project more personal is to add text to it. Whether you’re adding the names of people getting married to a generic floral cross stitch design, birth information to a project on theme with the new baby’s room or just adding a word or phrase that’s meaningful to you, adding words to cross stitch projects make them that much more special.

But if you’re not working with a project that already has text built in, or you want to change the text that’s there, that can feel a little daunting.

Caterpillar Cross Stitch has a great guide to adding names and words (as well as numbers) to projects, which talks you through what to consider and how to actually go about adding text to a cross stitch project successfully.

You’ll need to think about what kind of font you want to use and if you’re using back stitched letters or larger filled letters, how much space you need and how the letters work together in the text you’re planning to make sure it’s readable.

Their post includes common pitfalls such as running out a space or ending up with text that’s off center and how to avoid them (spoiler: chart out your text before you stitch!).

The whole post is really helpful if you’ve never added lettering to a project before and don’t know where to start. I like to use block letters in back stitch when learning how to add text to cross stitch, but of course there are tons of lettering options. Check out this collection of cross stitch fonts if you want to see some different things you can try.

And head over to Caterpillar Cross Stitch to get more tips for how to successfully add lettering to your cross stitch projects. They also have their own alphabet and number charts you can buy to add text to your stitching.

Have you ever added text to a cross stitch project? I’d love to hear how it went!

[Photo: Caterpillar Cross Stitch]

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