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.

Save

Next Pattern:

31+ Cross Stitch Ideas For Teacher Appreciation Gifts

I’ll admit to not taking as much care as I should when finishing cross stitch projects. Just like blocking in knitting or crochet, taking the time to finish a cross stitch project right means it will look its best, whether you’re making it as a gift or to keep.

And when it comes to cross stitch, the best method for finishing is washing and pressing.

Kat and Catkin and Lillie makes the argument that you should always press your finished pieces, and wash them the vast majority of the time as well.

Washing of course will help if there is any visible dirt that got on the project while stitching, but it also helps remove oils and skin cells you can’t see but that can speed up damage to your project in the long run.

Washing and pressing also help remove creases from the hoop or from storing the project, and if you use heat-erasable marking pens to grid your fabric, this will remove any visible marks.

So we’ve got the why down, but what about the how?

Kat has a great step by step tutorial on how to wash your cross stitch projects and how to iron them safely. You probably have everything you need to do this, it just takes a bit of time to go through the process. It’s certainly worth it, though, if you’ve spent a lot of time on a project and are gifting it or framing it and want to show it off to its best.

Click over to the post at Catkin and Lillie for all the details, plus some really good thoughts on times when you might not want to wash a project and how to test the colorfastness of your threads so you’ll know if a project is safe to wash.

Do you wash and press your finished cross stitch projects? I’d love to hear all about your process!

[Photo: Catkin and Lillie]

Next Pattern:

Have you read?

Leave a Reply