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]

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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