Learn to Cross Stitch in Minutes

If you’re making a New Year’s resolution to learn how to cross stitch — or you want to teach someone how to cross stitch in the new year — check out this overview from Yarn Tree, which says you can learn to cross stitch in five minutes.

The page covers the basic tools, how to get started, make stitches and finish your work, and includes a simple balloon pattern to try for your first project. It only covers regular x cross stitching and backstitching, so this is a really quick, not-too-detailed overview that should get you started but of course is not the end of all you might need to know about cross stitch.

Still, it will certainly keep you from feeling intimidated and hopefully encourage you to dive right in and give it a try.

If you have any tips for teaching cross stitch to others, or things that helped when you were learning, we’d love to hear them!

[Photo via Yarn Tree.]

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35+ Sunflower Cross Stitch Patterns

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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