Designer Spotlight: Banani Stitchery

If you’re looking for a realistic cross stitch pattern from your favorite dog or cat, you’ll want to check out Banani Stitchery. This shop is full of gorgeous designs for different breeds of cats and dogs, so you can stitch up a Norwegian forest cat or a red toy poodle or a great variety of other cats and dogs.

There are less accurate but still adorable kitten cross stitch patterns, as well as bunnies, mostly with a spring flair. There’s also a section called cute characters, which is full of other adorable animals like a owl on a stack of books, a teddy bear in the rain and a baby goat going to the airport with a coffee and a travel bag.

Many of their patterns are large, colorful and complex, but if that’s your thing there are a lot of beautiful projects here, too. I love this vintage baubles cross stitch pattern, full of classic holiday ornaments packed in a box. If you still use ornaments like this, or fondly remember ornaments that looked like this, it would be a wonderful addition to your Christmas decor.

The pattern is 160 by 197 stitches and uses a whopping 73 colors and one blend. The design comes out to 11.43 by 14.07 inches, or 29 by 35.7 cm. It uses full and half cross stitches as well as backstitch.

Another big category is flowers, where you will find lots of colorful, realistic looking florals. There are a few landscapes, vintage inspired designs like the one shown here, and collections of patterns you might want to stitch together, such as flowers in vases or little dogs.

If this sounds like your kind of cross stitch, check out all their designs at Banani Stitchery.

Know a designer you’d like to see in the spotlight? Leave a comment or fill out the form linked at the top of the page!

[Photo: Banani Stichery]

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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