Designer Spotlight: LaSelva Design

If you are looking for cute cross stitch patterns of animals, LaSelva Design is the place to go because that’s literally all they have. This California based Etsy shop boasts more than 350 patterns as of this writing, and almost all of them have animals in them.

Even the holidays section is mostly patterns of animals wearing Santa hats, with a few Halloween patterns thrown in.

There are many more dog cross stitch patterns than there are cats, because the projects are largely breed specific designs. There’s a wide range offered, from classics like corgi and labs to different kinds of spaniels, pugs, rottweilers and more. These are generally pattern sets with two or more options that alter coloration, expression or pose so you can make one that looks like your dog.

Here I’m sharing the beagles because that might be my favorite breed (as a person who has never owned a dog). There are two options, one smiling and one with a more neutral face. They both measure 37 stitches wide and the smiling beagle is one stitch shorter than the non smiling one (31 versus 32 stitches). The smiling one uses 15 colors, while the other uses 12.

There are a good number of cat cross stitch patterns, too, but here instead of a lot of breeds you’ll also find cats like lions, leopards and cheetahs.

You’ll also find a lot of birds, with some you might keep as pets and others you’ll only see in nature. All of these designs look accurate to real animals, and again there are often multiple poses of the same animal sold together so you have options for the personality you want for your creation.

In addition there are patterns for aquatic animals, farm animals, insects, wild animals, reptiles, and pets that don’t fall into the dog/cat/bird classifications such as guinea pigs, ferrets and rabbits.

The only exceptions to the everything animals rule are a section of fruit cross stitch patterns and one labeled nature, which has florals and some geometric designs.

If you’re an animal lover and want to stitch up your pet or make pet themed cross stitch projects for your friends and family, LaSevla Design is a great shop to check out!

[Photo: LaSelvea Design]

There are a lot of stories out there these days about AI use in the crafting space for everything from answering technique questions to writing patterns.

And there’s a lot of content about how to spot AI patterns, or even just photos on the Internet that people are claiming to have made but are clearly AI generated.

As the models get better, though, it can be harder to tell. Gone (mostly) are the days of AI sewing patterns with models who have too many fingers, but one thing it’s still hard for AI to replicate is individual stitches.

You’ll see this in knitting, crochet and cross stitch, where a project might look good from a distance but if you zoom in you’ll see there aren’t individual stitches, or they don’t look the way real stitches would look.

That’s part of the rationale behind a change at r/CrossStitch, the largest cross stitch community on Reddit, which now requires people to show a close up of their finished projects (lots of people seem to be showing off the backs, too) to prove their projects aren’t AI.

Lord Libidan reported on this news and I agree with them that I’m not sure why people in an online forum would be sharing AI “finished objects” when it’s a venue where you can’t sell patterns. But I understand their desire to keep the forum free of AI images. I wish Etsy had such a requirement so that people selling patterns had to prove they’d actually stitched them (though there are plenty of patterns that just show a chart and not a finished item, AI or not.)

Lord Libidan probably has a different perspective because he’s seen people selling kits made from an AI version of a free cross stitch pattern of his. Which is another layer.

I have my own feelings about AI and crafting but I just think it’s really interesting both the things people will do with AI without saying it’s AI and the lengths other people will go to in order to prove something is or isn’t AI. Or even calling something AI just because it’s really detailed and looks good? What times we live in.

[Photo via Lord Libidan, closeup of an image made by Google Gemini’s Nano Banana]

Have you read?