Designer Spotlight: Happy Sloth Patterns

You know a little bit what you’re in for when you see the header for the Etsy shop Happy Sloth Patterns, whose tagline is “dumb patterns made by an idiot human.” Which at least implies there’s no AI to be found in the Australia-based shop, but also plenty of snark.

(That’s also clear from the images in the shop header, which include a bow-bedecked squirrel with the words “we’re all doomed but whatever.” You’ll find these in the category “unsupportive animals.”)

The biggest category is for animals and pets, and there’s plenty of sarcasm and silliness here. Since the people are all about geese this year (see also: goose cross stitch patterns) I couldn’t help share this silly goose who got a little too silly. This design is 87 by 69 stitches, which comes out to 6.2 by 4.9 inches, or 15.8 by 12.5 cm when stitched on 14 count fabric.

That would look great in an eight-inch hoop, though measurements are included for other counts in the pattern notes if you want to make it smaller. It uses eight colors.

Another big category is vintage style patterns, which include vintage looking often cartoony designs with more modern sayings. In a similar vein there is the quotes and text patterns section, which praises the virtues of prescription medications, offers plenty of puns and some throwbacks to the early days of personal computing.

There are also patterns that are specifically pop culture references such as a Pac Man game and designs inspired by Firefly, the Golden Girls and Dirty Dancing among many others.

And there’s a lot more to be found here, including patterns for Halloween, Christmas and Valentine’s Day, projects with wizards and mermaids, feminist and LGBT designs, some collections of mini patterns (including fairies, forest creatures, tiny rubber ducks and more) and a collection of emotional support animals that also don’t feel all that supportive.

There’s even a nice array of alphabets you can buy to use in your projects, everything from retro gaming fonts to one inspired by the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and one with flames inside the letters.

Check out all the goodies at Happy Sloth Patterns.

[Photo: Happy Sloth Patterns]

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Designer Spotlight: Max Stitches Art

I have never stitched a greeting card, but I kind of like the idea of it. It’s a card and a gift all in one, and hopefully one the recipient will hang onto for years to come.

This collection of easy and colorful greeting card cross stitch patterns from Susan Bates (via Gathered) are a great place to start if you want to stitch your own greeting cards.

These text-based designs cover a lot of card-sending events, such as:

get well soon
happy birthday
thank you
thinking of you
congratulations
anniversary
new home
good luck

The lettering is done in gradients and there are other details like hearts and stars, a house key and a gift, depending on the text. There are full cross stitches and back stitch on all of the cards, and they use 15 colors for the cross stitching and six for the back stitching (and just two colors are used for both, so it’s 19 colors total).

The designs vary a bit in size but the biggest one is 52 by 67 stitches, which comes out to 3.75 by 4.75 inches or 9.5 by 12 cm when worked on 14 count fabric or 28 count evenweave. The text suggests beads are also used in the patterns but there’s no note of them in the key, so go wild and add some beads if you like.

Designs are worked on a price of 6 by 8 inch/15 by 20 cm fabric and then mounted to a card with a colorful baking piece of card stock behind it. This is easy to assemble with whatever cardstock greeting cards you have on hand.

You can get the free charts as a PDF from Gathered.

Have you ever stitched your own greeting cards? I’d love to hear about it, or let me know if these inspire you to try.

[Photo: Susan Bates via Gathered]

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