Give Your Cross Stitch People the Right Skin Tone

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

I was recently approached by Alyssa, the cross stitcher behind the Etsy shop Stitchonomy, to take a look at her cross stitch pattern subscription club, known as The Pattern Club.

I took a look around and there’s a lot of cute stuff and fun options you’ll want to check out, especially if you love themed patterns that are small, easy to stitch and fun to combine.

The Pattern Club combines cross stitching with a social network. When you open the site you’ll see a news feed and have the ability to share updates much like you would on Facebook. You can see who is online, have buddies and post your own updates and photos. The community aspect is a little sparse right now but that should only grow.

The stitch along hub is the place to find the most recent patterns and information on the current stitchalong. As of this writing the Book Lover’s stitchalong was happening, with little designs like Peter Rabbit, a skull for Hamlet and keys for Jane Eyre as well as authors including Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens and Jane Austen.

Other pattern collections include European designs, Halloween, ocean life, an allotment garden and more. Alyssa tells me there’s a new theme every month that either she picks or members in the community suggest. You can stitch just the patterns you want or put them together to make a larger collage.

The Stitchanomini vault gives you access to all of the previous patterns, and new patterns are released daily through the stitchalong. You can download individual patterns (most of them are 19 by 19 stitches) as PDFs or Pattern Keeper files. The PDFs include a color and black and white chart as well as a floss list.

Another cool thing you can do is build your own pattern collages from all of the squares that have been released. The collage configurator allows you to add patterns of your choosing to a grid ranging from 2×2 patterns up to 4×4. You can scroll through all the current patterns or search by theme and size to make a project that suits your needs. (Above is an example I made kind of at random but you get the idea.)

If you want to check it out, you can grab a three-day free trial and see all the pattern options. Membership is $7.99 a month, or if you pay for a year at a time you’ll get two months free. In addition to the patterns in the club, members receive discounts on patterns and supplies purchased through the shop within the club. Annual members get access to three paid/retired stitchalongs and lifetime members receive all retired patterns.

If you check it out I’d love to hear what you think!

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