Printables to Get Your Cross Stitch Life Organized

I think a lot of crafters this time of year are thinking about ways to get more organized, whether it’s decluttering craft supplies, organizing materials or doing a better job of keeping track of and/or finishing projects.

If you’re interested in some of these things for cross stitch, I’ve got a few printables to help you get started.

Stitch All The Things has made a free printable cross stitch journal to help you organize your stitching life. This includes pages for tracking projects (name, designer, start and finish dates, what size fabric you used and other notes); keeping track of your number of WIPs through the year; a more detailed project list that includes things like colors, plans for the finished object and what needleminder and project bag you used (which I guess could be good if you don’t finish the project so you can find it again?); pattern and kit inventories; stitchalong trackers; a stitchminder inventory (you could change the header on this one to make it a floss inventory if you’d rather); project shopping list; fabric inventory and more.

The pages can be downloaded from their website as an Excel document you can edit, or as a Google Drive document or a PDF. Some of the pages initially had years on them but that has been removed so you can use them whenever you want, and for as long as you want.

Creatively Crafting has a free cross stitch progress printable you can get by signing up for email notifications about their membership program. I did this one and you have to click through a couple of pages to join the waitlist, then confirm your subscription and the planner page comes in a separate email. It has spaces for listing the project, a floss list, what kind of fabric you’re using, the number of stitches, any notes and a place to track your progress.

[Cross stitch image by Alicja from Pixabay]

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35+ Sunflower Cross Stitch Patterns

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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