Holiday Bauble Cross Stitch Patterns

I love a good handmade Christmas ornament, and some of these patterns literally are meant to be ornaments, while others are patterns of ornaments, which you could probably make into ornaments or stitch up to hang near the tree. They’d also make cute gift tags for holiday gifts. Read on to discover some super cute Christmas bauble cross stitch patterns.

In the first category, we have this cute Christmas ornament with a car and Christmas tree from Living on the Rainbow on Etsy. This sweet design is meant to be a holiday ball ornament, with instructions for that included in the pattern (she used a sewing machine but it could probably also be stitched by hand). You could also make this design on a card or in a little hoop if you don’t want to make the ball.

The Merry Stitchmas ornament pattern from Kreinik is meant to be placed in an ornament frame, but a small hoop would work, too. It’s worked in silk thread with gold filament accents, making it a fancy looking design that would be great as a gift.

The Starry Ornament cross stitch patterns from Flamingo Toes are ornament shaped but made to display in little festive hoops. I love the kind of retro colors on these, and the addition of pompom trim to the 3-inch hoops for display adds and extra layer of cuteness.

If you just want to stitch ornaments that aren’t necessarily ornaments themselves, check out the Christmas ornament cross stitch pattern from Craft with Cartwright. These pretty retro ornaments are easy to stitch and you can change up the colors to suit your holiday decor.

Or try these little Noel bauble cross stitch patterns from Echevette. The site is in French but you don’t need to read anything to understand this pattern (and the colors are actually listed in English as well as by DMC number so it’s easy to choose colors).

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Cross Stitch Patterns to Celebrate Pride

I have not done a lot of big cross stitch projects, but sometimes even with small projects it can be hard to decide exactly where to begin and how to work through the chart if you’re working with multiple colors. The general categories for the possible methods are known as cross country and parking.

Cross country means that you’re working one color at a time, moving around the chart (or the section of the chart you’re working on) until you’re done with that color. Parking means you’re working in a smaller section and doing all the colors in that area, “parking” the threads by leaving them attached to the canvas but out of the way while you finish each section.

Royal Rows is a specific way of parking named by Alison Royal, which is explored in detail on a post on Stitching Daily.

The idea is that you’re working one “tower” of stitches at a time (she uses a section of 10 stitches across by 20 down, but you can do whatever makes sense to you). You work all the stitches of a color at a time, starting at the top left and working your way down. When you’re done with a color you can park it where needed in the section below your current tower (known as the dungeon) or in the “east tower,” which is the section to the right.

There’s also a specific way of dealing with thread ends when you’re done with a color. This is a super simplified version (head to the blog post at Stitching Daily to get all the details) but the basic idea is that you’re working from left to right and top to bottom across the work, parking the threads in the next section when you’re done with them and systematically choosing which color to work with next.

The whole idea of parking is kind of overwhelming to me though I will admit that it makes a lot of sense. I guess I need to try it on a smallish big project and see how it goes. Do you use the parking method of cross stitch? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo via Stitching Daily]

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