Review: Enchanted Garden Cross Stitch

Crafting and gardening seem to go together, and a lot of designers use flowers in their designs because they also enjoy growing them.

Gail Bussi is a cross stitch designer and an avid gardener, and she combined her two loves for a collection of outdoors-inspired patterns called Enchanted Garden Cross-Stitch.

The book includes 20 patterns featuring flowers, bird, butterflies and other images from backyard gardens, complete with words or quotes related to gardens, flowers and the outdoors.

For example a couple of the designs feature quotes from the book The Secret Garden, another has a quote from Maya Angelou, while others have lines like “flowers are happy things” and “heart of a rose,” which is shown on a heart-shaped design of flowers and an arbor.

The patterns use a lot of different colors (the fewest colors used in a pattern I could find were 12 or 13) and there’s a lot of detail that makes these patterns best suited to stitchers with some experience. Each chart is shown on a single page regardless of the size of the design, which means some of them are much smaller than others. That could be a problem for those with vision issues.

Also some of the colors used in the charts make it harder to read them. A few of the charts are shown with green as the background color, which can make it harder to see the stitches that are also green around them, or even to read the words in the design.

If you can get past those issues (by copying the image larger and in black and white, for instance) these are pretty designs and things that would be nice to stitch for flower-loving friends or for yourself.

The book also includes a recipe for carrot cupcakes, tips on making herbal tea and other tidbits from the garden.

Enchanted Garden Cross-Stitch is a lovely book with sweet designs worth taking the time to get over the hurdles of their presentation for.

About the book: 114 pages, paperback, 20 designs. Published 2023 by Stackpole Books. Suggested retail price $26.95.

One of the easiest ways to make a cross stitch project more personal is to add text to it. Whether you’re adding the names of people getting married to a generic floral cross stitch design, birth information to a project on theme with the new baby’s room or just adding a word or phrase that’s meaningful to you, adding words to cross stitch projects make them that much more special.

But if you’re not working with a project that already has text built in, or you want to change the text that’s there, that can feel a little daunting.

Caterpillar Cross Stitch has a great guide to adding names and words (as well as numbers) to projects, which talks you through what to consider and how to actually go about adding text to a cross stitch project successfully.

You’ll need to think about what kind of font you want to use and if you’re using back stitched letters or larger filled letters, how much space you need and how the letters work together in the text you’re planning to make sure it’s readable.

Their post includes common pitfalls such as running out a space or ending up with text that’s off center and how to avoid them (spoiler: chart out your text before you stitch!).

The whole post is really helpful if you’ve never added lettering to a project before and don’t know where to start. I like to use block letters in back stitch when learning how to add text to cross stitch, but of course there are tons of lettering options. Check out this collection of cross stitch fonts if you want to see some different things you can try.

And head over to Caterpillar Cross Stitch to get more tips for how to successfully add lettering to your cross stitch projects. They also have their own alphabet and number charts you can buy to add text to your stitching.

Have you ever added text to a cross stitch project? I’d love to hear how it went!

[Photo: Caterpillar Cross Stitch]

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