Book Review: Mini Cross Stitch Ornaments

There’s nothing cuter than handmade holiday ornaments, and Kooler Design Studio has you covered for ideas with their book Mini Cross Stitch Ornaments.

The book, published by Leisure Arts, has 160 little deigns for just about everything you’d want to use to deck your halls, from snowmen to Santas, stockings and bells, even a Christmas cow.

There’s a series of penguins, a collection of religious designs and images for the 12 days of Christmas.

It also includes details on different ways to finish the ornaments, such as stitching on plastic canvas and trimming to size, using regular cross-stitch fabric backed with felt or adding batting and backing to make a more three-dimensional shape, among other options.

This book is a lot of fun to look at and to stitch from and should give you a lot of ideas for your own holiday decor as well as gifts.

About the book: 64 pages, paperback, 160 patterns. Published by Leisure Arts, retail price $9.99.

Looking for more Christmas Cross Stitch patterns? Check these out on Etsy.

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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