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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A while back I made a little rainbow cross stitch pattern and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it, so I turned it into a patch. My idea was that it could be used on a jacket or backpack, or you could add a pin to the back and wear it temporarily on a shirt or elsewhere.

But what if you want to make your design more permanent? Is it possible to turn a piece of cross stitch into an iron-on design?

It turns out yes, it is, and Sirious Stitches has done it so I didn’t have to try to figure it out on my own.

The way they did it was by using HeatnBond, an iron-on adhesive that attaches fabrics without sewing. There was still sewing involved to finish the edges of the cross stitch fabric and make it look like a purchased patch. The post shows how to do this by hand or with your sewing machine. (I just did blanket stitch edging on mine, which doesn’t look like a “real” patch but is also a lot faster.)

Once you have the patch prepared it’s a pretty easy matter of using the fusible adhesive to the back of the patch so you can then iron it onto whatever jacket, pair of jeans, bag or whatever else you might want to add it to.

I guess I’m a little paranoid about the washability of cross stitch projects, though you could hand wash anything with an iron-on cross stitch patch as you might need to with a purchased iron-on patch, anyway. But this does look really cool and is a great option if you know you want to permanently add a cross stitch patch to a garment of bag.

Get the full tutorial over at Sirious Stitches. Would you add an iron-on cross stitch patch to something? I’d love to hear what you would use this technique for!

[Photo: Sirious Stitches]

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