Cross Stitch Celebrating Canadian Cities

I love the old of old fashioned travel posters, and translating those kinds of posters into cross stitch is a fun way to commemorate a trip or stitch up your favorite city.

This collection of Canada themed city travel posters from Unique Stitch Crafts would be fun to make in honor of Canada Day or just because you love Canada.

The options are for Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and Quebec.

Each design includes landmarks of the city, as well as a bit of water in the foreground and a sailboat or two. Which makes me wonder if sailing sailboats is such an iconic activity in Canada, and if it is how I’ve missed that all these years.

In any case, each design is 83 by 112 stitches, which comes out to 6 by 8 inches or 15 by 20.3 cm on 14 count fabric.

The Quebec pattern uses 18 colors, and I assume the others would be similar in the number of colors they include as well. There are whole stitches and back stitches on all of the designs.

Stitch up one for your favorite city or make the set to decorate a whole wall with Canadian goodness.

And if the cities of Canada aren’t your thing, this same designer has other city travel poster style cross stitch patterns including Amsterdam, New York City, Istanbul, Prague, Sydney, Copenhagen, Chicago and Paris to name a few. There are also some for different states and countries like Arizona, Colorado and Alaska, China and Scotland.

There are also some similarly styled projects featuring American national parks like Mammoth Cave, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. So there are lots of other options to commemorate your travels in cross stitch, or to stitch up places you live or places you love, so take some time to click through and check out the other patterns, too.

[Photo: Unique Stitch Crafts]

The cross stitcher behind the blog Sirious Stitches is quite into biscornu.

If you’re not, a quick primer: biscornu are three-dimensional cross-stitched objects with eight points, often with an indention in the middle that makes them look a bit like doughnuts without the hole. They can be just about any size and subject you can think of. They’re often used as pincushions but can also be seasonal decor or just decoration for any time of year.

I’ve got a collection of biscornu cross stitch patterns here.

Once you’ve stitched one or several (they are a little addicting) you might wonder what you can add to them to make them even more extra.

It very much depends on the design of your biscornu and the look you are going for, but Sirious Stitches has a great post all about some of the options you might consider.

I don’t want to give you the whole list because you need to go visit and see all of their great biscornu they’ve stitched, but one really easy thing that you can do with a lot of designs is take advantage of that center indent by adding a button, beads, silk flower or another embellishment.

This is great to do just with a basic button from your stash that coordinates with the design and colors of the cross stitching, but it’s extra fun if you have a button that’s on theme, such as a leaf for a fall biscornu or a flower shaped button for a floral design. Add a jingle bell to a Christmas pattern, or a charm if you don’t have a button that coordinates.

Just this one idea is sure to get you thinking about ways to embellish biscornu (not to mention other cross stitch projects) but head over to Sirious Stitches to see all of their ideas for embellishing biscornu to make these already fun projects even more fun.

Have you ever made biscornu? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo: Sirious Stitches]

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