Designer Spotlight: Max Stitches Art

Max Stitches Art is an Etsy shop based in Ukraine that’s full of gothic, dark and witchy designs you’re sure to love if that’s your vibe.

The biggest section in the shop is called new, which isn’t super helpful for knowing what’s in there, but if you give it a browse you’ll get a sense for what the shop’s designs are like. Which, again, is dark (lots of these designs are literally dark because they’re shown stitched on dark fabric).

You’ll find weird things like a turtle with a terrarium on its back, a mushroom that’s really a UFO with a tractor beam for a stem, a jackalope and a cat dressed as Dracula.

One of my favorites, though it is hard to pick, is this reading frog (I’ve been on a bit of a frog and toad kick lately because they’re basically my life coaches). The pattern is 80 by 86 stitches and uses 18 colors. On 14 count fabric it comes out to 5.71 by 6.14 inches, or 14.51 by 15.6 cm.

The biggest more specific category covers animals, and again there’s a big range of projects, including a snake or a frog in a jar, a cat on the toilet reading the newspaper, a snuggly hedgehog in a sleeping bag, a ship in a bottle with an octopus and much more. A separate section is for insects, with lots of moths and ladybugs among others.

You’ll also find a lot of Christmas patterns in a similar style, with aliens, bottles, dinosaurs, cyrptids and ghosts heavily featured. There are also special sections for ghosts and skeletons, but they definitely aren’t exclusive to Halloween.

There are also witchy designs, funny quotes, kitchen themed items and more.

Check out all the designs at Max Stitches Art on Etsy. If you love it there’s also an option to buy the whole store!

[Photo: Max Stitches Art]

One of the easiest ways to make a cross stitch project more personal is to add text to it. Whether you’re adding the names of people getting married to a generic floral cross stitch design, birth information to a project on theme with the new baby’s room or just adding a word or phrase that’s meaningful to you, adding words to cross stitch projects make them that much more special.

But if you’re not working with a project that already has text built in, or you want to change the text that’s there, that can feel a little daunting.

Caterpillar Cross Stitch has a great guide to adding names and words (as well as numbers) to projects, which talks you through what to consider and how to actually go about adding text to a cross stitch project successfully.

You’ll need to think about what kind of font you want to use and if you’re using back stitched letters or larger filled letters, how much space you need and how the letters work together in the text you’re planning to make sure it’s readable.

Their post includes common pitfalls such as running out a space or ending up with text that’s off center and how to avoid them (spoiler: chart out your text before you stitch!).

The whole post is really helpful if you’ve never added lettering to a project before and don’t know where to start. I like to use block letters in back stitch when learning how to add text to cross stitch, but of course there are tons of lettering options. Check out this collection of cross stitch fonts if you want to see some different things you can try.

And head over to Caterpillar Cross Stitch to get more tips for how to successfully add lettering to your cross stitch projects. They also have their own alphabet and number charts you can buy to add text to your stitching.

Have you ever added text to a cross stitch project? I’d love to hear how it went!

[Photo: Caterpillar Cross Stitch]

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