Designer Spotlight: Mrs. Peggoty Arts

If you like your cross stitch projects with a literary twist, you’re sure to love the Etsy shop of Mrs. Peggoty Arts. This shop based in Italy describes itself as being “where art meets literature and other incredible things.” Let’s take a deeper look.

The shop as of this writing has more than 50 cross stitch patterns covering a range of literary figures. You’ll find (as a rather random sample) Miss Marple, Dorian Gray, the Dodo from Alice in Wonderland, Mr. Knightley, Willy Wonka, Anne of Green Gables. Captain Nemo, Aslan and Jo March from Little Women. There’s an emphasis on children’s literature including several designs from Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, as well as lots of English literature such as characters from the Brontes.

Because I’m a big fan of Matilda (both the book and the character) I picked her design as a sample to show you. Most of them are similar to this, though, with an ornate border and the character with their name somewhere in the design. Here Matilda almost looks like she’s juggling books, which seems appropriate if you’re familiar with the character.

This particular design is 130 by 184 stitches and uses whole stitches only in 22 colors. On 14 count fabric it will measure 9.29 by 13.14 inches, or 23.6 by 33.3 cm. The whole background is stitched but if you wanted to make it a little easier for yourself you could use colored fabric and not stitch all of the background. Totally up to you!

There are also some smaller cross stitch patterns, also with a literary twist. There are also TV and movie cross stitch patterns, if your taste runs more to Jessica Fletcher or Elvira as well as historical figures like Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe and Henry VIII.

In addition to these fun cross stitch patterns, Mrs. Peggoty also has great literary and pop culture themed coloring pages to download and print, and some of her designs are available as paint by number patterns, too.

Check out Mrs. Peggoty Arts on Etsy to see all the fun stuff!

[Photo: Mrs. Peggoty Arts]

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]

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