Get Your Christmas Stitching Started with Christmas Greetings

I have been cleaning out my office recently and I found this little booklet from Leisure Arts, which seemed appropriate since it’s basically Christmas in July time.

Christmas Greetings has patterns for three different designs that could be used in a lot of different ways. There is a text greeting and a picture with each one, and they are designed to be finished in such a way that they look like open books.

It sounds a little daunting, but the book does provide a materials list and instructions for how such a thing is done (they’re made with adhesive mounting board, batting and cording, as well as ribbon for the “bookmark” and charms to decorate the “pages”).

The charts, designed by Carol Emmer, are lovely and this would be an interesting way to decorate for the holidays, or choose part of any chart to make a wall hanging, pillow or other decor.

Have you ever stitched a book like this? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo via Leisure Arts.]

Looking for more Christmas Cross Stitch patterns? Check these out on Etsy.

Next Pattern:

Book Review: Retro Christmas Cross Stitch

I have never stitched a greeting card, but I kind of like the idea of it. It’s a card and a gift all in one, and hopefully one the recipient will hang onto for years to come.

This collection of easy and colorful greeting card cross stitch patterns from Susan Bates (via Gathered) are a great place to start if you want to stitch your own greeting cards.

These text-based designs cover a lot of card-sending events, such as:

get well soon
happy birthday
thank you
thinking of you
congratulations
anniversary
new home
good luck

The lettering is done in gradients and there are other details like hearts and stars, a house key and a gift, depending on the text. There are full cross stitches and back stitch on all of the cards, and they use 15 colors for the cross stitching and six for the back stitching (and just two colors are used for both, so it’s 19 colors total).

The designs vary a bit in size but the biggest one is 52 by 67 stitches, which comes out to 3.75 by 4.75 inches or 9.5 by 12 cm when worked on 14 count fabric or 28 count evenweave. The text suggests beads are also used in the patterns but there’s no note of them in the key, so go wild and add some beads if you like.

Designs are worked on a price of 6 by 8 inch/15 by 20 cm fabric and then mounted to a card with a colorful baking piece of card stock behind it. This is easy to assemble with whatever cardstock greeting cards you have on hand.

You can get the free charts as a PDF from Gathered.

Have you ever stitched your own greeting cards? I’d love to hear about it, or let me know if these inspire you to try.

[Photo: Susan Bates via Gathered]

Next Pattern:

Have you read?