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]

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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