Make HERstory with Badass Cross Stitch

Have you ever seen embroidery samplers or quilts in museums, or even your own family heirlooms, and wondered what life was like for the women who made those pieces?

When Shannon from Badass Cross Stitch was gifted a couple of old embroidery projects by her future in-laws, she became consumed with the idea that the things we make are a way to tell our stories, and she decided to take that idea and make it huge.

The result is Badass Herstory, a multi-craft fiber arts project encouraging women and gender non-binary people to learn fiber arts as a way to express themselves and ultimately produce a small project that will become a part of an immense installation and a digital museum sharing the stories of each project.

This is such a cool idea and is stunningly ambitious (her goal is to collection one million pieces) but I really love it. Check out the details page for tons of great information to guide you to tell your story, produce your piece, document it and send it to Shannon for inclusion in her project.

What do you think about this? Are you going to submit? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

[Photo: Badass HERstory.]

I was recently doing a scroll through some crafting websites that I follow and I came across this amazing collection of cross stitch job patterns from Koekoek. It includes more than 100 different jobs, sports and hobbies, and these would be so much fun to personalize and stitch up for friends, family and co-workers.

You’ll find everything from occupations like doctor, fireman, maternity nurse, tax lawyer and librarian to sports like swimming, fishing and beach volleyball.

There’s pattern for watching marathon amounts of Netflix, doing triathlons (basically the same thing, right?), teaching geography, graphic design and catching Pokemon. Among many others.

The designs are categorized by medical professions, office jobs, stitch a sport (which includes other hobbies) and education professions, or you can just scroll through all the patterns to see the variety. Check out all the designs on their website, or scroll down on this page to see them in categories and with more details.

They suggest working these with a five inch hoop using 14 count cross stitch fabric or 28 count evenweave stitched over two threads for a fancier look. The number of colors needed for each design varies, but they are pretty small projects so there’s generally not a ton of detail.

The patterns also include text for what the image is showing like “the knitter” or “the veterinarian,” but they also have a post about how to personalize the designs with different text such as the person’s name, a date or a quote. There’s also a full bask stitch alphabet included in the post so you can chart out your own text.

And while the designs show specific people, you can change up details like hair color, clothing color and eye color if you want to make it look more like the person you intend to give it to. You can also purchase custom cross stitch kits from them to make the project exactly the way you want it without having to do the work yourself.

I think this is such a fun idea for a graduation gift or a holiday gift. If you check it out I’d love to know which characters you are stitching!

[Photo: Koekoek]

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