Designer Spotlight: Needle Lot Designs

A reader suggested that I share Needle Lot Designs with you, which isn’t a designer I was familiar with, so let’s check it out together.

Their designs are colorful, with lots of animals, fantasy and folklore inspired designs. The page’s tagline says it makes “cross stitch patterns for quirky hearts.”

The largest category on the site is called animal friends, though there are plenty of other categories about animals and nature, too (such as bugs & beetles and aquatic animals). These aren’t the sorts of animals you’d generally expect to find in cross stitch. There’s a poison heart frog, a capybara in a teacup, a racoon and possum teaming up to go through the trash.

My favorite here is this pretty red panda, sitting on a branch in front of a stand of bamboo. This one uses 19 colors, and it’s all full cross stitches but the designer calls it an intermediate pattern because of the size and number of colors involved. It’s 100 by 105 stitches, and shown worked on 32 count Belfast linen.

Worked on 14 count fabric it measures 7.25 by 7.5 inches, or 18.1 by 19.1 cm.

There are also art nouveau designs featuring animals, as well as a few animal-themed tarot cards.

The fantasy and folklore section includes Mothman, Nessie and a baby jackalope, as well as a couple of dragon designs and Cerberus reimagined as a three-headed cat. (Yes, it’s called Cerberpuss.)

You’ll even find a few Halloween/fall and Christmas/winter patterns if you like the seasonal stuff. Check out all their designs at Needle Lot Designs on Etsy.

And if you want me to feature one of your favorite designers that I haven’t mentioned yet, you can share that by leaving a comment on this post or heading to the top of the page, clicking on “suggest a craft” in the middle of the top navigation bar and filling out the form there.

[Photo: Needle Lot Designs]

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30 + Bird Cross Stitch Patterns

It’s back to school time where I live, which I always feel like is a great time to learn a new skill or take a deeper dive into something that you might not have learned a lot about before.

Usually when we are learning new hobbies we only know what we know. We learn the terms that we encounter, the skills that come up in the projects that we want to make. It’s not that we don’t care about other basics or different approaches, we just learn what we need to know to make what we want to make.

And that’s totally fine, but sometimes it’s a good idea to go back and review the basics or learn the things you might have missed the first time.

In that spirit I share this post from Caterpillar Cross Stitch all about basic cross stitch terms that every stitcher ought to know.

Did you know that the little bundle of thread you use for cross stitch is called a skein, for example? Or the difference between grid size and design area in a pattern? Or that working complete stitches one at a time is known as the English method? (I didn’t know that one! Apparently doing half of the stitch across the row and then coming back and finishing it is the Danish method. Who knew?)

There’s also a little bit about getting started with confidence that might be helpful at any skill level.

So what I’m saying is, even if you feel like you know a lot about cross stitch already, head over to Caterpillar Cross Stitch and check out their list of terms and make sure you know them all. If nothing else you’ll feel a little smarter, either because you already knew them all or you learned something new!

And if you do learn something new, I’d love to hear about it.

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