How to Cross Stitch a Family Portrait

Making your family in stitching is a super cute way to decorate your house. You can frame the finished project and hang it by the door, make it into a pillow, photograph it and use it on your Christmas cards — there are so many fun ways to use it. And it’s a great way to document your family’s growth or preserve a time in your life.

But how do you cross stitch a family portrait?

You can work with an actual photograph as inspiration or just line up your family in your mind. This post from Martha Stewart covers the basics of how to draw out people. I love the tips here about the size of people’s heads! Also remember to consider the things that make a person look like themselves, which is often their hair, if they have glasses, and other distinguishing features.

While a cross stitch portrait can’t have a lot of details, making sure you hit the basics of a person will make it look more like them.

Catholic Sprouts has great tips on making your family in pixels, too, and you can use her patterns of her family as a basis for your own if you’re not sure where to start.

More Like Home has a video tutorial on stitching a family portrait if you’re more of a visual learner (note: she mentions her website in the video but when I click the link none of the photos show up and I get a security warning when I try to download her templates, so proceed with caution there).

If you need more help with how to cross stitch a family portrait, or make a stitched version of anyone you want, check out the book Pixl People, which has thousands of options for personalizing people, from body type and hairstyle to clothing and accessories like pets, plants and more than can be included in your designs. Stitch People has a great basic guide to designing people that might be a little less overwhelming in that it helps guide you through the process of selecting the details and producing your chart.

You can also get someone to make a custom chart for you to stitch from, like this one from Overflow Creative on Etsy.

[Photo: Catholic Sprouts.]

One of the easiest ways to make a cross stitch project more personal is to add text to it. Whether you’re adding the names of people getting married to a generic floral cross stitch design, birth information to a project on theme with the new baby’s room or just adding a word or phrase that’s meaningful to you, adding words to cross stitch projects make them that much more special.

But if you’re not working with a project that already has text built in, or you want to change the text that’s there, that can feel a little daunting.

Caterpillar Cross Stitch has a great guide to adding names and words (as well as numbers) to projects, which talks you through what to consider and how to actually go about adding text to a cross stitch project successfully.

You’ll need to think about what kind of font you want to use and if you’re using back stitched letters or larger filled letters, how much space you need and how the letters work together in the text you’re planning to make sure it’s readable.

Their post includes common pitfalls such as running out a space or ending up with text that’s off center and how to avoid them (spoiler: chart out your text before you stitch!).

The whole post is really helpful if you’ve never added lettering to a project before and don’t know where to start. I like to use block letters in back stitch when learning how to add text to cross stitch, but of course there are tons of lettering options. Check out this collection of cross stitch fonts if you want to see some different things you can try.

And head over to Caterpillar Cross Stitch to get more tips for how to successfully add lettering to your cross stitch projects. They also have their own alphabet and number charts you can buy to add text to your stitching.

Have you ever added text to a cross stitch project? I’d love to hear how it went!

[Photo: Caterpillar Cross Stitch]

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