How to Cross Stitch Your Family

At my daughter’s school there’s a teacher who is amazing at cross stitch, and she loves making cross-stitch family portraits. They’re always so cute, and a fun way to add some personality to your walls that’s completely personalized and a little more special than a picture.

While it can be time consuming to figure out exactly how to stitch a family portrait, it’s not really that hard to cross stitch your family.

Martha Stewart has a quick overview, which I like for the advice on head sizes (10 stitches across for adults, 9 for kids, even smaller for babies).

But if you really want some good instructions on how to cross stitch your family portrait yourself, head over to Do Small Things with Love. She has a tutorial that shows how she turned a picture into cross stitch, and did another a year later that shows a different look. She has little sample people you can use as the basis for your design, or just go on your own with some graph paper to turn a picture into an adorable cross-stitched portrait.

Have you ever done this? I think it looks like a lot of fun and I’d really like to try it some day. If you have, I’d love to hear your tips!

[Photo via Do Small Things with Love.]

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31+ Cross Stitch Ideas For Teacher Appreciation Gifts

The other day I shared some cross stitch patterns with ornaments on them, so this time around I wanted to share cross stitch patterns that you can use as ornaments. It would be fun to do a whole tree in your craft room with cross stitch ornaments, or just add a few to your tree or give them as gifts.

These little quilt inspired cross stitch patterns from Flamingo Toes look like ornaments and fit in 3-inch hoops, which are perfect for hanging on the tree or using to decorate a gift. I love the pastel colors on these but you can use more traditional Christmas colors if you like.

This cute Christmas tree from Lagodargetoshop uses a single color and fits in a 4-inch hoop, but you could make it smaller if you wanted by trimming the last ornaments and gifts from the sides, or just stitch the tree without any other embellishments. Either way it’s a cute addition to your holiday tree.

Stitched Modern has a super cute collection of retro Christmas ornament cross stitch patterns from designer Gera. This is a printed pattern that will be shipped to you. Each pattern is about 40 by 56 stitches, or 2.9 by 4 inches/7.4 by 10 cm on 14 count fabric. To work the whole set you’ll need 20 colors of floss.

These snowflake ornaments from Our Little Handmade Home are each about 2.5 inches/6.4 cm when stitched on 14 count fabric, and they use a single color of floss. They are pretty in red but you could also do white on a blue or black background, or whatever suits your other Christmas tree decorations!

From the description it sounds like this set of vintage style cross stitch characters is presented as one large chart, but the photo from Sampler Antique Stitch shows each of them stitched up as their own little ornament, so it gets included here. You’ll find Santa and snowmen in different poses in this cute collection.

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