Designer Spotlight: Dizzy Digital Craft Co

I plan out my posts ahead of time and sometimes leave myself notes in my planner about why I wanted to write about a particular thing. My note for today’s designer, Dizzy Digital Craft Co, says “Ramadan and cats.”

By the time I made it back to the site, the front page was full of Mother’s Day projects and frogs. But that’s fine, too. There were still some cats to be found (a whole section, in fact), and lots of other fun stuff, too.

These designs are colorful, whimsical, include a lot of flowers and look like lots of fun to stitch. While we’re on he subject of cats, you know I couldn’t resist sharing this design of a black cat in a sweater (since I’m a knitter with a black cat), thought the pattern listing says it’s crochet when it’s clearly knit. The design is 142 by 200 stitches, which comes out to 10.14 by 14.29 inches or 25.76 by 36.29 cm on 14 count fabric. It uses 25 colors. I might just have to make it for my Baron.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, there are plenty of other cute animal cross stitch patterns here, including the aforementioned frogs, dogs, butterflies, some sheep, cows (Highland and regular), and a cute squirrel.

As mentioned there are plenty of Mother’s Day patterns, as well as projects for the nursery and projects inspired by nature, from flowers and mountains to beach scenes and funky mushrooms.

Those Ramadan patterns I mentioned are in a section called cross stitch, which isn’t that helpful but I did manage to find them again. There are lovely designs with a mosque and a crescent moon. In addition in this section you’ll find bookmarks, a few designs with people and a place where you can order a custom made cross stitch pattern.

Check out all these colorful goodies and more at the Dizzy Digital Craft Co shop on Etsy.

[Photo: Dizzy Digital Craft Co]

One of the easiest ways to make a cross stitch project more personal is to add text to it. Whether you’re adding the names of people getting married to a generic floral cross stitch design, birth information to a project on theme with the new baby’s room or just adding a word or phrase that’s meaningful to you, adding words to cross stitch projects make them that much more special.

But if you’re not working with a project that already has text built in, or you want to change the text that’s there, that can feel a little daunting.

Caterpillar Cross Stitch has a great guide to adding names and words (as well as numbers) to projects, which talks you through what to consider and how to actually go about adding text to a cross stitch project successfully.

You’ll need to think about what kind of font you want to use and if you’re using back stitched letters or larger filled letters, how much space you need and how the letters work together in the text you’re planning to make sure it’s readable.

Their post includes common pitfalls such as running out a space or ending up with text that’s off center and how to avoid them (spoiler: chart out your text before you stitch!).

The whole post is really helpful if you’ve never added lettering to a project before and don’t know where to start. I like to use block letters in back stitch when learning how to add text to cross stitch, but of course there are tons of lettering options. Check out this collection of cross stitch fonts if you want to see some different things you can try.

And head over to Caterpillar Cross Stitch to get more tips for how to successfully add lettering to your cross stitch projects. They also have their own alphabet and number charts you can buy to add text to your stitching.

Have you ever added text to a cross stitch project? I’d love to hear how it went!

[Photo: Caterpillar Cross Stitch]

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