Designer Spotlight: Crystal Feather Crafts

If you like landscapes, animals and floral cross stitch patterns with a big does of cuteness, odds are good you’ll find something you want to stitch at Crystal Feather Crafts. This Etsy shop has more than 200 patterns with a focus on nature and often a cute touch.

For example in the animals section you’ll find adorable little dinosaurs, lots of sweet cats and a corgi butt. I love the maneki neko cat shown here, which really pops on dark blue fabric but would be pretty on whatever color you have handy.

This design is 74 by 102 stitches, which comes out to 5.3 by 7.3 inches on 14 count fabric (or 13.4 by 18.5 cm).

In addition to adorable animals you’ll find some pretty standard landscapes (heavy on the mountains), dainty floral designs and some bees, butterflies, moths and other insects that are more realistic than the other animals.

There are also some sweet holiday patterns for Christmas and Halloween (love all those cute little ghosts!), and a few more general autumn ones as well (featuring mushrooms, pumpkins and the like). A handful of other patterns are listed as being for the home, funny (a few cartoony sushis here among other things), alphabets and more.

If you like their designs as of this writing you can get 30 percent off your purchase when you buy three patterns at the same time. Check them out at Crystal Feather Crafts.

And if you are a cross stitch designer or you know a cross stitch designer you would like to see featured here at Craft Gossip, let me know in the comments. Or you can drop me a link and some more information about what makes you/them special by filling out the form you get when you click “suggest a craft” at the middle top of the page. Thanks for your help!

[Photo: Crystal Feather Crafts]

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How to Railroad Your Cross Stitch

I am known to be really paranoid when it comes to cutting cross stitch fabric for a project. I will math it out, count, recount, think about it, worry, decide it needs to be bigger than math plus my already large margin for error suggests. If I could just be confident in choosing the correct size of fabric I’d have a lot more stitching time!

Sometimes you have a lot of extra fabric beyond where you are stitching because your fabric is too big. Or maybe you’re just working on a big project that leaves excess fabric potentially in your way when you are stitching.

Hannah Hand Makes has a post all about how to deal with excess fabric on the sides of a large cross stitch project (which is actually a podcast if you’d rather listen). She is talking more about huge stitchalong projects where you need a big piece of fabric than my particular problem of timid cutting, but the same advice applies.

I am lazy and don’t want to buy new products, so I would probably devise some sort of rolling and clamping situation with items I already have in the house, but she has some great tips for actual products you can buy that will help with this situation such as large hoops, standing frames and scroll frames. One of these solutions would certainly be worth the investment if you’re doing a year long (or otherwise long term) stitchalong or really big project where that excess fabric is going to cause problems.

Because beyond being annoying, odds are good I’m going to end up stitching right through that extra fabric and making a big mess.

Check out all the tips for working with a really big piece of cross stitch fabric over at Hannah Hand Makes.

What’s the biggest cross stitch project you’ve ever made? I’d love to hear all about it!

[Photo: Hannah Hand Makes]

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