Review: Sports Alphabets to Cross Stitch

This time of year is full of sports activities for kids, and if you like to personalize their bags — or anything else — in a crafty way you can combine their love of sports with your love of craft with a little help from Sports Alphabets to Cross Stitch.

This Leisure Arts booklet, with designs by Kristi Bryant, includes sports-themed alphabets for:

soccer
volleyball
bowling
golf
baseball
bouncy ball (yeah, I’m not sure, either)
tennis
basketball
hockey
football

The book also includes a design with football helmets, balls and stars, with room for words and the year to make a memory plaque. There’s also a sports-themed birth announcement, as well as blank charts for your own designs and a simple small alphabet should you want to combine the graphic images with regular text.

In many cases, as you can see in the samples on the cover, the balls cover up parts of the letters, so color choice will play a big role in your design’s readability. But these are definitely a fun starting off point for room decor, gifts for coaches and more.

The book is available as a paperback or downloadable PDF, both of which cost $9.99.

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35+ Sunflower Cross Stitch Patterns

If you like repeating cross stitch designs, borders you can use on other projects or as bookmarks, florals and Japanese-inspired designs, you’ll want to check out 200 Japanese Cross Stitch Designs by Saeko Endo. This collection of 200 cross stitch charts is low on instruction but big on inspiration for those who are comfortable taking a chart and running with it.

The book includes a brief introduction to the needed supplies and basics of stitching, but mostly is just photographs of finished designs and the charts that go with them. The charts vary widely in size and there can be anywhere from one to six charts printed on a single page.

Many of the designs are repeating patterns, but the chart shows a larger version so you can see how the repeats go together. Each chart has marked what portion is repeating and how many stitches and rows it includes. Other than that the charts are not numbered, but there are darker lines every five rows to help you count.

The patterns all range from one to three colors, and some include half cross stitches or back stitching, but most are full stitches.

The book is arranged into categories of motifs: geometric patterns, retro patterns, traditional Japanese patterns, floral and fauna and borders and pictorial motifs.

My favorites are the Japanese designs, many of which are recognizable from woodcuts, kimono designs and traditional shashiko embroidery. You’ll find cherry blossoms, suns, knots, and simple line designs that would be lots of fun to stitch.

There are a few pages devoted to different ways to modify charts such as changing colors, changing the way to design is repeated, flipping and rotating designs.

Other than that you’re on your own for how you actually want to use these designs. Of course they can just be stitched and framed but it might have been nice to see some of the projects stitched and staged in a way you might use them in everyday life (repeating motifs as coasters, or a bigger design turned into a pillow, for example).

Sometimes it helps to see designs used in different ways to get you thinking about how you might use them yourself. If you don’t need that creative push, this is a fine book full of patterns you’ll have fun playing with in different ways.

About the book: 112 pages, paperback, 200 patterns. Published 2025 by David & Charles. Suggested retail price $24.99.

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