Designer Spotlight: Happy Little Mouse

I was scrolling through cross stitch patterns on Etsy the other day, as I do pretty regularly, and a design from Happy Little Mouse caught my eye, so I decided it was time to share them with you.

Happy Little Mouse is the store of Alina Pilipchuk, a Ukrainian designer with more than 350 designs in her shop.

These big, bold, colorful designs are fanciful and often include fantastic creatures, gorgeous butterflies, realistic animals and skeletons of creatures. There’s a gothic feel to a lot of the designs, which are often shown stitched on dark fabric.

There are gorgeous mushroom cross stitch patterns (which I mention because my daughter is going through a mushroom phase right now), cryptids and pop culture designs, snarky cross stitch, a few holiday patterns (and Christmas specifically), and a ton of beautiful detailed insect patterns, to name a few categories (so many great moths!).

Again because of my daughter’s interests I can’t resist sharing the Baby Yaga house cross stitch pattern, which I may very well be making her for the next gift-giving holiday I can get it done in time for. (If you don’t know Baba Yaga, she’s a character from Slavic folklore who lives in a house that stands on chicken legs.)

This design uses 14 count fabric and 23 colors. It is 71 by 113 stitches, and the final design measures 5.07 by 8.07 inches, or 12.88 by 20.5 centimeters.

Many of Happy Little Mouse’s patterns are available in bundles, such as mushrooms, forest animals and dinosaur skeletons (yes, really!). You can also buy a bundle that is the entire shop as well as all future designs, which is a great deal if you like and want to support their work. I love this set of designs for book lovers, which would be great for a kids room, or to hang in your reading nook or by your bookshelf.

[Photo: Happy Little Mouse]

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Butterfly Cross Stitch Patterns

One of the fun things about cross stitch is all the different surfaces you can stitch on. Of course regular cross stitch fabric is the most common, you can stitch on anything with holes (and even sometimes on things without holes, if you use water soluble cross stitch fabric.

An option that has become more popular with the widespread availability of laser cutting machines is wooden blanks, which are often cut in shape to be bookmarks, holiday ornaments or other simple shapes. They can be keychains, picture frames or necklaces.

(While not wooden I even have a stitchable journal that I cross-stitched on.)

Stitching on wood or heavy card stock isn’t the same as stitching with regular cross stitch fabric, so Craft with Cartwright wrote a post about how best to work with these wooden blanks.

The main thing to know is that you don’t need a sharp needle because the holes are drilled. She also has tips on how to manage your thread (she recommends one strand of embroidery floss folded in half) and finish your project if you need help with that.

Check out the post at Craft with Cartwright for tons of tips and ideas for working with wooden blanks.

Ready to try it out for yourself? You can get rectangular pieces your could mount to a journal yourself from Toms New Old Things.

Fiore Designs has square blanks that come in different sizes and colors for your crafting needs. I am putting some stamp shaped blanks from Lunari Woods on my wish list (they also have gift tags in different sizes and colors).

You can get stitchable keychains from Millions of Stitches, circles from Geniuses of Wood, baubles from Pip and Chip and Christmas ornament shapes from Happy Stitching Time to name just a few.

Have you ever stitched on a wooden blank? I’d love to hear any tips you have!

[Photo: Craft with Cartwright]

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