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How to Make Your Own Needle Minders

October 29, 2025 by Sarah White

diy needle minder

In my travels around the crafty Internet, I see a lot of tools, some of which seem useful, others not so much. 

One cross stitch tool that I thought looked cool but I’d never bothered to buy was a needle minder. These little tools involve a pair of magnets with something fun on top of one of them. You place your cross stitch fabric (I’m sure you could use it for other hand sewing projects as well) between the two magnets, with the fancy one on top.

Then when you aren’t working on your project, you stick your needle to the top of the needle minder and the magnet holds it there. No more losing your needle in the middle of a project, or having to stick the needle through your project to keep it where you want it. 

Because I’m lazy in weird ways, instead of buying a needle minder to try out, I made my own. Two, in fact. 

My needle minders are made with flat disc magnets and air dry clay, which is fun because you can make it any shape you want and then decorate it with paint or markers once its dry. 

I kept mine pretty simple, with a circle and a kind of diamond shape (I was going for an eye but I didn’t quite make it LOL). You could use little cutters to make shapes if you have some for polymer clay or other purposes. 

These were really fun and easy to make, and you can even make your own air dry clay for this purpose, though purchased air dry clay is fine, too. Again, lazy in specific ways that make making things “easier” than leaving the house to buy them. 

To each their own. 

Anyway, if you’d like to make your own needle minders for yourself or to give as gifts to your stitching friends, you can find the tutorial over at Our Daily Craft. 

Do you use a needle minder? I’d love to hear what you think about it!

Next Pattern:

  • What Are Needle Minders and How Do You Use One?
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Cross Stitch Cards for All Occasions

I have never stitched a greeting card, but I kind of like the idea of it. It’s a card and a gift all in one, and hopefully one the recipient will hang onto for years to come. 

This collection of easy and colorful greeting card cross stitch patterns from Susan Bates (via Gathered) are a great place to start if you want to stitch your own greeting cards. 

These text-based designs cover a lot of card-sending events, such as:

  • get well soon
  • happy birthday
  • thank you
  • thinking of you
  • congratulations
  • anniversary
  • new home
  • good luck

The lettering is done in gradients and there are other details like hearts and stars, a house key and a gift, depending on the text. There are full cross stitches and back stitch on all of the cards, and they use 15 colors for the cross stitching and six for the back stitching (and just two colors are used for both, so it’s 19 colors total). 

The designs vary a bit in size but the biggest one is 52 by 67 stitches, which comes out to 3.75 by 4.75 inches or 9.5 by 12 cm when worked on 14 count fabric or 28 count evenweave. The text suggests beads are also used in the patterns but there’s no note of them in the key, so go wild and add some beads if you like. 

Designs are worked on a price of 6 by 8 inch/15 by 20 cm fabric and then mounted to a card with a colorful baking piece of card stock behind it. This is easy to assemble with whatever cardstock greeting cards you have on hand.

You can get the free charts as a PDF from Gathered. 

Have you ever stitched your own greeting cards? I’d love to hear about it, or let me know if these inspire you to try. 

[Photo: Susan Bates via Gathered]

 

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