Cross-Stitch

Charts, patterns and everything needlepoint

Give Your Cross Stitch People the Right Skin Tone

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One of the popular genres of cross stitching these days is cross stitching family portraits, or self-portraits, or cross stitched versions of famous people or made up people or any combination of the above.

There are whole books and websites dedicated to helping people develop patterns for these kinds of projects or even to make them totally on their own. See for example the Do It Yourself Stitch People book as well as Customize Your Cross Stitch: Friends and Family.

These resources are great and offer lots of options to help you make stitched family portraits that actually look like the people (and pets!) in your family or friend group, or like your favorite famous people.

Whether you are using a book or website to help you or going it alone on your designs, one of the hardest things can be choosing the right floss for a person’s skin color. Of course this comes up with any people stitched in your projects, regardless of if they are meant to look like you or someone you know.

It’s easy to end up with a face that’s too pink or too dark, or with highlights or shadows that just look weird.

That’s where this awesome chart from Lord Libidan comes in. It includes a bunch of different sets of shades for skin tones, getting progressively darker across the chart. Each selection includes a skintone, highlight and shadow, so you can combine them to make a face that looks natural. If the people in your design have different skin tones, you can also pick one to use as your baseline and then select darker or lighter colors for the other faces as needed.

This is only a little bit of the chart shown above, so click over to Lord Libidan’s website to check out the whole range of skin tones matched with DMC colors.

[Photo: Lord Libidan]

Book Review: Customize Your Cross Stitch

Have you read?

Toy Story Cross Stitch Patterns

I’m going to go ahead and admit that I totally missed Toy Story 4, so it took my by surprise when Toy Story 5 came out, but let’s celebrate with some Toy Story cross stitch patterns. 

This sweet design including Woody, Buzz and Jessie is from The Xstitch Shop, and they actually have a few different Toy Story options. This one says it is for intermediate stitches, probably because of the size and number of colors, but the sales page doesn’t say how big it is or how many colors it uses. It’s still cute, though!

If you’ve got a fan of Jessie in your household, this collection of Jessie themed icons is super cute to stitch. The design is from Mercury Stitches and it measures 97 by 144 stitches. that comes out to 6.9 by 10.3 inches, or 17.6 by 26.1 cm, and uses 11 colors. It has full and half cross stitches, as well as back stitching and French knots. 

Share the love of friendship with this sweet Woody and Buzz heart hands cross stitch pattern from Pixell Patterns. This design uses eight colors and is shown worked on 14 count fabric, but the notes don’t indicate how bit is is (based on a finished project photo, though, it looks pretty big). 

And for the Buzz Lightyear fans, of course we have to have a “To infinity and beyond” pattern, so here’s one from Silver Lake Stitches. This design is super cute on blue fabric, but use whatever you have. It measures 78 by 92 stitches, which comes out to 5.6 by 6.6 inches, or 14.2 by 16.7 cm, on 14 count fabric. It calls for 14 colors. 

Or if you want to go beyond the core three main character toys, check out this project from ThreeOOne Patterns, which includes our main toys as well as Bo Peep and her sheep, Bullseye the horse, the Slinky dog, Rex, Ham, the Potato Heads and an alien. The design is 310 by 80 stitches, which comes out to 21.14 by 3.5 inches, or 53.7 by 8.9 cm, when worked on 14 count fabric. It uses 65 colors. Or pick out your favorite characters to make a smaller project. 

All those characters and a few more are found on the mini Toy Story character sampler from Knotalot UK (only part of which is shown above). This one uses 31 colors and measures 134 by 108 stitches. It includes whole and fractional stitches, as well as back stitching. On 14 count fabric stitching the whole thing would make a project that’s 9.57 by 7.71 inches, or 24.31 by 19.59 cm.