Designer Spotlight: Trellis & Thyme

Trellis & Thyme is a US-based designer that makes cute and easy-to-make cross stitch, felt softie patterns and sewing patterns sold on Etsy.

Many of the designs are little samplers with four different items with a seasonal twist, so you can stitch them all together as shown or make individual projects, or just stitch one of them if its your favorite.

For a seasonally appropriate example as I write this, here’s the frosty treats sampler, which features a striped ice pop, a sundae in a waffle cone, a Neapolitan ice cream treat and another treat with a straw sticking out.

The full design is 5.5 by 2 inches, or 13.5 by 4.5 cm, so it’s easy to pull one out and stitch it as a gift tag, for a card, onto a napkin or anywhere else you might want a bit of kawaii cuteness.

Many of their designs have the same kind of feel, whether it’s a collection of seasonal vegetables, sushi, holiday themed snacks or even adorable items for back to school.

In addition to these sampler style patterns there are plenty of cute seasonal designs with little characters, text and icons of the season. For example the Be Thankful pattern, which has a pilgrim, corn, squash, a bee and a crow. You’ll also find some adorable animals, single-image kawaii food designs and a few other options.

You can check out all of their cross stitch patterns here.

If you like other needle crafts in addition to cross stitch you’ll find some fun things to check out, too. There are a couple of crochet patterns, embroidery patterns, adorable quilt blocks and even more adorable feltcraft projects (I know it’s not what we’re here for, but check out this cute little penguin!).

You can also learn more about their projects and publications on their blog, and visit their Etsy site to shop all the goodies.

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Cute Food Cross Stitch Patterns

When you put all the time and energy you do into making a great cross stitch project, it’s worth taking the time to frame it in a way that will make it look its best.

Often for smaller designs we’ll choose to frame projects in a hoop, which is cute and a fine option, especially for seasonal projects you might want to change out through the year. Others will send their finished projects for professional framing, which is a great option for gifts and heirloom items that need to be preserved, but it can also be quite expensive.

Crewel Ghoul has a great tutorial for a way that you can easily frame your cross stitch projects at home with just a few supplies.

She uses adhesive mounting board (but you can use non-adhesive board if you have some one hand or you need a size that’s not available in an adhesive version) and a few other basic supplies to secure the sides and corners of the cross stitch fabric around the board before putting the design in the frame.

This requires a bit of hand sewing, but we’re cross stitchers so I’m sure we can handle that.

Framing your cross stitch like this gives it a little padding in the frame, which makes it look better than if it were just flat in a frame with no special finishing. It’s also a great idea to use a frame without glass or to leave the glass out of the frame so it doesn’t crush your stitches.

And though this is super secure it’s not 100 percent permanent if you decide you don’t want the project framed in that way any more. Or you can take it out of the frame and the edges are still all nicely finished so you can display it a different way without having to do anything else to it.

Check out the tutorial at Crewel Ghoul.

[Photo: Crewel Ghoul.]

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