Designer Spotlight: Cotton Clara

This cheerful shop specializes in little, colorful designs, with a bit of a pop culture twist (and more than a few designs that have to do with food). Let’s check out Cotton Clara!

This shop based in the UK sells cross stitch charts, embroidery kits, sewing kits and craft supplies. The cross stitch patterns are all in one category, but there are only about 50 of them, so it doesn’t take too long to scroll through and see what’s on offer.

There are a few bookmarks with a variety of themes, including books, mushrooms and tea, but most of the patterns are small hoops.

I’m not actually a Swiftie but I feel like the I Love Taylor pattern is pretty indicative of the style and use of color you’ll find on the patterns here. The pattern apparently comes with other motifs and lettering so you can profess your love for Christmas or add words related to being born or married in a particular year. (I assume there’s a full alphabet but can’t tell for sure.)

It looks like the pattern uses about 10 colors, which you could of course change if you don’t love the pastel look. There are also other cross stitch sweaters on the page that have different sweater designs and include different motifs if there’s something else you are looking for.

I mentioned food above so I guess it’s time to talk about the food cross stitch patterns. I see choc spread, pickles in a jar, cherries, peanut butter, olives, kimchi, jam and more, which would be cute to stitch up for a friend who loves that kind of food.

You’ll also find some animals, Christmas designs, and a few text based designs as well.

Check out all the cute designs (and more goodies for stitchers) at Cotton Clara.

[Photo: Cotton Clara]

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Book-Themed Bookmark Cross Stitch Patterns

I have never stitched a greeting card, but I kind of like the idea of it. It’s a card and a gift all in one, and hopefully one the recipient will hang onto for years to come.

This collection of easy and colorful greeting card cross stitch patterns from Susan Bates (via Gathered) are a great place to start if you want to stitch your own greeting cards.

These text-based designs cover a lot of card-sending events, such as:

get well soon
happy birthday
thank you
thinking of you
congratulations
anniversary
new home
good luck

The lettering is done in gradients and there are other details like hearts and stars, a house key and a gift, depending on the text. There are full cross stitches and back stitch on all of the cards, and they use 15 colors for the cross stitching and six for the back stitching (and just two colors are used for both, so it’s 19 colors total).

The designs vary a bit in size but the biggest one is 52 by 67 stitches, which comes out to 3.75 by 4.75 inches or 9.5 by 12 cm when worked on 14 count fabric or 28 count evenweave. The text suggests beads are also used in the patterns but there’s no note of them in the key, so go wild and add some beads if you like.

Designs are worked on a price of 6 by 8 inch/15 by 20 cm fabric and then mounted to a card with a colorful baking piece of card stock behind it. This is easy to assemble with whatever cardstock greeting cards you have on hand.

You can get the free charts as a PDF from Gathered.

Have you ever stitched your own greeting cards? I’d love to hear about it, or let me know if these inspire you to try.

[Photo: Susan Bates via Gathered]

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