Cross-Stitch

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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]

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D&D Cross Stitch Patterns

My husband is a D&D player from way back and still does role playing with his friends most weekends. There are lots of great D&D cross stitch patterns, but somehow the ones that caught my eye this time have a theme of being about the D&D classes or involving dice (or both). 

I love this collection of the D&D classes done as tarot cards. These would be so fun to stitch up for all the people in your party, or make the full set as one big wall hanging for the game room. There are 16 patterns total (just a few are shown here) and each one just uses three colors. The designs are from GlitchStitchAU.

This set kind of reminds me of astrological signs, though I can’t really say why. This set of 16 designs from White Raven Patterns is color coordinated so it sort of makes a rainbow if you stitch all of them. The dungeon master one is more colorful. Each one uses five or six colors and fits in a 10-inch hoop. 

Combining character classes and dice we get this set of 14 designs from Stitch it Picasso. Each one includes the class name and a die with a number on it, as well as some images that make sense for that class (the bard has a lute and music notes, for example). Each design is around 90 by 90 stitches and they use 13 to 19 colors each, depending on the design. 

Or you can make patches that look like dice with this D20 dice bundle from Non Player Creation. The patches are inspired by the four seasons, but you could change up the colors to suit your campaign setting if you like. They are 31 by 35 stitches and use between nine and 12 colors depending on the season. 

And speaking of D20s, this little dragon might be protecting your dice or cursing them, it’s hard to tell. It’s kind of cute, though! The design is from Cross Stitch Wow and measures 80 by 95 stitches. It fits in an 8-inch hoop and uses 16 colors.