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]

I was recently doing a scroll through some crafting websites that I follow and I came across this amazing collection of cross stitch job patterns from Koekoek. It includes more than 100 different jobs, sports and hobbies, and these would be so much fun to personalize and stitch up for friends, family and co-workers.

You’ll find everything from occupations like doctor, fireman, maternity nurse, tax lawyer and librarian to sports like swimming, fishing and beach volleyball.

There’s pattern for watching marathon amounts of Netflix, doing triathlons (basically the same thing, right?), teaching geography, graphic design and catching Pokemon. Among many others.

The designs are categorized by medical professions, office jobs, stitch a sport (which includes other hobbies) and education professions, or you can just scroll through all the patterns to see the variety. Check out all the designs on their website, or scroll down on this page to see them in categories and with more details.

They suggest working these with a five inch hoop using 14 count cross stitch fabric or 28 count evenweave stitched over two threads for a fancier look. The number of colors needed for each design varies, but they are pretty small projects so there’s generally not a ton of detail.

The patterns also include text for what the image is showing like “the knitter” or “the veterinarian,” but they also have a post about how to personalize the designs with different text such as the person’s name, a date or a quote. There’s also a full bask stitch alphabet included in the post so you can chart out your own text.

And while the designs show specific people, you can change up details like hair color, clothing color and eye color if you want to make it look more like the person you intend to give it to. You can also purchase custom cross stitch kits from them to make the project exactly the way you want it without having to do the work yourself.

I think this is such a fun idea for a graduation gift or a holiday gift. If you check it out I’d love to know which characters you are stitching!

[Photo: Koekoek]

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