Designer Spotlight: Velvet Pony Design

If you like animal cross stitch patterns, you’ll want to check out the offerings from Velvet Pony Design. As of this writing the shop, based in Türkiye, has more than 200 patterns, with more than half of them being of animals and birds.

Animal cross stitch covers everything from multicolored geometric designs of animal faces, including an elephant, bear and cow to name a few; to animal outlines with trees inside the body shape; to colorful tropical fish, a snail with trees on its back, scenes with dinosaurs, a lovey capybara, a scarf wearing llama and more.

I love this little penguin family, which measures 116 by 97 stitches and uses 18 colors. On 14 count fabric it measures 8.3 by 6.9 inches, or 21.2 by 17.6 cm. The pattern includes sizing for other fabric counts and in fact the sample was worked on 18 count fabric and fits in a nine inch hoop. This would be a cute one to make as a baby gift or for any family of three that likes penguins.

On the bird front are more patterns in a similar style (and it didn’t occur to me until I was writing this that the penguins were in animals not birds, but that’s fine). You’ll find birds in the same styles, with lots of common American birds like blue jay, cardinal, woodpecker and robin. There are some more exotic birds, too, like tucans and a hoopoe (and a very cute puffin).

In addition to flowers and birds, you’ll find floral cross stitch, a few Christmas designs and a category called other, which includes some fruit, a geometric map of the world, a moth and some other things.

The shop also has a nice collection of bundles if you find you like their style and want to buy more than one pattern. Some of the patterns in the collections are not ones I noticed in the main categories, so you might find some surprises (baby woodland animals, sea creatures and more) if you look there.

Check out everything they have to offer at Velvet Pony Design on Etsy.

[Photo: Velvet Pony Design]

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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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