Cross Stitching on Wooden Blanks

One of the fun things about cross stitch is all the different surfaces you can stitch on. Of course regular cross stitch fabric is the most common, you can stitch on anything with holes (and even sometimes on things without holes, if you use water soluble cross stitch fabric.

An option that has become more popular with the widespread availability of laser cutting machines is wooden blanks, which are often cut in shape to be bookmarks, holiday ornaments or other simple shapes. They can be keychains, picture frames or necklaces.

(While not wooden I even have a stitchable journal that I cross-stitched on.)

Stitching on wood or heavy card stock isn’t the same as stitching with regular cross stitch fabric, so Craft with Cartwright wrote a post about how best to work with these wooden blanks.

The main thing to know is that you don’t need a sharp needle because the holes are drilled. She also has tips on how to manage your thread (she recommends one strand of embroidery floss folded in half) and finish your project if you need help with that.

Check out the post at Craft with Cartwright for tons of tips and ideas for working with wooden blanks.

Ready to try it out for yourself? You can get rectangular pieces your could mount to a journal yourself from Toms New Old Things.

Fiore Designs has square blanks that come in different sizes and colors for your crafting needs. I am putting some stamp shaped blanks from Lunari Woods on my wish list (they also have gift tags in different sizes and colors).

You can get stitchable keychains from Millions of Stitches, circles from Geniuses of Wood, baubles from Pip and Chip and Christmas ornament shapes from Happy Stitching Time to name just a few.

Have you ever stitched on a wooden blank? I’d love to hear any tips you have!

[Photo: Craft with Cartwright]

I don’t usually cross stitch text or add words to my cross stitch projects. Sometimes I will sign things using basic block lettering worked in backstitch (luckily my initials are pretty easy to stitch), but if you give your cross stitch as a gift or otherwise want to personalize it, adding text is a great way to go.

But if a project didn’t already come with text, and you don’t want to draw your own, you’ll need a good cross stitch font that you can use for your project.

I like collecting fonts that are easy to read and to stitch and that would be good for lots of different uses.

For example I really like this bold alphabet font from Cross Stitch with Art, which has both capital and lowercase letters as well as numbers if you need them for dates or other information on your design. The capital letters are an inch/2.5 cm/14 stitches tall, which makes it easy to figure out how much space you need to leave for them. It’s a nice, basic, readable serif font you can use for lots of project.

If you want a script font that’s still really readable, check out Magic Calligraphy from Soft Pattern Designs. This hand drawn font has upper case letters around 28 stitches tall, with lower case letters mostly being around 20 stitches (though the ones that go up or down a lot like f, p and y are bigger). The numbers also vary a bit in size but range from 25 to 29 stitches.

Sometimes you just want a classic font that looks like sports lettering, and in that case you’re going to need Varsity, an all caps font from Stitch Mod. This one has letters that are 21 stitches tall, and it includes capital letters and numbers. But there are definitely times this one would come in handy!

Another sometimes useful and really cute font is this alphabet block letters alphabet from Stitch Junction. These letters are all upper case and look like classic building blocks, and there are also numbers available. This one would be perfect for a birth announcement project or some other cross stitch for the baby’s room.

And if that’s not enough for you, check out this post with 85 free cross stitch fonts for you to try!

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