Cross-Stitch

Charts, patterns and everything needlepoint

Designer Spotlight: Happy Little Mouse

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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]

Have you read?

Toy Story Cross Stitch Patterns

I’m going to go ahead and admit that I totally missed Toy Story 4, so it took my by surprise when Toy Story 5 came out, but let’s celebrate with some Toy Story cross stitch patterns. 

This sweet design including Woody, Buzz and Jessie is from The Xstitch Shop, and they actually have a few different Toy Story options. This one says it is for intermediate stitches, probably because of the size and number of colors, but the sales page doesn’t say how big it is or how many colors it uses. It’s still cute, though!

If you’ve got a fan of Jessie in your household, this collection of Jessie themed icons is super cute to stitch. The design is from Mercury Stitches and it measures 97 by 144 stitches. that comes out to 6.9 by 10.3 inches, or 17.6 by 26.1 cm, and uses 11 colors. It has full and half cross stitches, as well as back stitching and French knots. 

Share the love of friendship with this sweet Woody and Buzz heart hands cross stitch pattern from Pixell Patterns. This design uses eight colors and is shown worked on 14 count fabric, but the notes don’t indicate how bit is is (based on a finished project photo, though, it looks pretty big). 

And for the Buzz Lightyear fans, of course we have to have a “To infinity and beyond” pattern, so here’s one from Silver Lake Stitches. This design is super cute on blue fabric, but use whatever you have. It measures 78 by 92 stitches, which comes out to 5.6 by 6.6 inches, or 14.2 by 16.7 cm, on 14 count fabric. It calls for 14 colors. 

Or if you want to go beyond the core three main character toys, check out this project from ThreeOOne Patterns, which includes our main toys as well as Bo Peep and her sheep, Bullseye the horse, the Slinky dog, Rex, Ham, the Potato Heads and an alien. The design is 310 by 80 stitches, which comes out to 21.14 by 3.5 inches, or 53.7 by 8.9 cm, when worked on 14 count fabric. It uses 65 colors. Or pick out your favorite characters to make a smaller project. 

All those characters and a few more are found on the mini Toy Story character sampler from Knotalot UK (only part of which is shown above). This one uses 31 colors and measures 134 by 108 stitches. It includes whole and fractional stitches, as well as back stitching. On 14 count fabric stitching the whole thing would make a project that’s 9.57 by 7.71 inches, or 24.31 by 19.59 cm.