Review: Cross-Stitch to Calm

Cross stitch is a calming activity, especially when the pattern you’re working is simple and suits your personal style. Leah Lintz says she likes to cross stitch as a means of stress relief, but a lot of the cutesy patterns that are out there just didn’t suit her style.

So she designed her own projects and has published a bunch of them in the book Cross-Stitch to Calm: Stitch and Destress with 40 Simple Patterns.

If you’re new to cross stitch, there’s a little bit of an introduction here that covers basic supplies, reading charts and getting started, stitching different kinds of stitches in different directions and an easy way to finish off projects.

The patterns are arranged into categories: creatures, nature (which would be more accurately called plants), symbols and words.

A lot of the patterns involve leaving stripes of fabric unstitched in the middle of the pattern, which makes them even faster to stitch. For example, the star on the cover is striped with red and blue, but the white stripes are just the fabric showing through. This same technique is used to stripe an elephant, giraffe, cat and cherries, to name just a few patterns where it is used.

Most of the projects only use one or two colors (in fact it looks like there are two patterns that use three colors, and one each that uses four or five) so they’re great for beginners. The charts are large and each project is also shown stitched.

There’s a pretty wide range of patterns, from a butterfly to a bonsai tree, ice cream cone to anchors. The words eat, family, home and smile are charted, and I will admit to giggling when I saw that the chart for home had the word separated onto two lines, but you can always work it all in one line if you’d rather.

This collection might be one you want to flip through before you decide to buy the book to make sure the patterns are your style, but there are a lot of fun options for a new cross stitcher to try.

About the book: 112 pages, paperback, 40 patterns. Published in 2016 by Interweave Press. Suggested retail price $18.99

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Cross-Stich For Stress Relief - Unwinding And…

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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