Designer Spotlight: White Protea Art

If you like your cross stitch patterns a little bit gothic but also a little bit cute, you’re going to want to meet Etsy seller White Protea Art.

Their designs are pretty firmly on the cute side of the creepy-cute divide, but the subject matter sometimes has a bit of a dark twist.

There are ghosts, but they’re the cutest little ghosts you’ve ever seen, living their best lives in the pumpkin patch, with a Santa hat, going camping, eating watermelon or reading a book. Sometimes the ghosts are cats.

You’ll find a witch frog in a cauldron, mushrooms growing from a book, a badger enjoying pumpkin ice cream.

But there’s also just plain cute animal cross stitch patterns, such as a pair of llamas for Valentine’s Day, a watercolor axolotl and kittens decorating a Christmas tree.

Lots of the patterns are seasonal, with a heavy emphasis on fall/Halloween and Christmas. In fact, all of the shop’s nearly 70 patterns as of this writing fall into five categories: summer, autumn, spring, Halloween and Christmas.

It’s hard to pick a representative example but here you’ll see the occult bookshelf, filled with books, pumpkins, potions and a few ghostie friends.

The pattern is 84 by 96 stitches, which comes out to 6 by 6.9 inches or 15.2 by 17.4 cm on 14 count fabric. It uses 17 colors and would be perfect for your bookcase or mantle during spooky season.

These patterns are adorable and if I had the time I’d do a whole series of ghosts, or all the mushroom patterns for my daughter’s room. If you like cottage core with a twist, you’ll love these projects.

Check out their whole shop at White Protea Art on Etsy.

Have a designer you love or an Etsy shop you want to spotlight? Send me the details by clicking on “suggest a DIY” at the top of the page and filling out the form.

[Photo: White Protea Art]

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Camping Themed 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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