Seasonal Cross Stitch with a Primitive Spin

This week’s designed spotlight is on Twin Peak Primitives, the design home for a duo of twin sisters from the Netherlands. Their work covers a lot of different subjects, including holidays, American patriotic designs, sampler-style stitches and more.

Since I’m writing this before Halloween, I wanted to point out in particular their Halloween designs. (Links here are Etsy links, but you can also buy direct from their website if you’re in Europe.)

They recently released a new Gothic Halloween collection for 2023 that includes nine different Halloween patterns, all worked in black. There are mini samplers, a biscornu, a triangular design and some small ornaments. The designs include a sampler with the alphabet and skulls, a Gothic crow, a threatening bee, the witches of Salem, a creepy wedding ceremony, another alphabet design with a witch on a broom and pumpkins, a pumpkin with skulls on its surface, a larger skull design and the biscornu, which has a geometric design.

There’s also a haunted chateau design that features a spooky looking house surrounded by crows, nights, and other details, along with an alphabet, the word Halloween and the year. In all they have 31 Halloween designs, which you can find here. A couple more of my favorites are the bus going to Salem and Silent Phantoms of the Night, but be sure to scroll through if you’re looking for new designs for the season.

In addition to the Halloween designs there are lots of American themed patriotic designs and pastoral scenes, winter and Christmas designs, and lots of mini collections with small patterns on a theme, like gingerbread, St. Patrick’s Day and holiday ornaments.

On their website they also have a nice collection of freebie patterns, most of which have a holiday theme. You’ll find some cute fall and Halloween designs there as well.

[Photo: Twin Peak Primitives]

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American Flag Cross Stitch Patterns

The other day I shared some cross stitch patterns with ornaments on them, so this time around I wanted to share cross stitch patterns that you can use as ornaments. It would be fun to do a whole tree in your craft room with cross stitch ornaments, or just add a few to your tree or give them as gifts.

These little quilt inspired cross stitch patterns from Flamingo Toes look like ornaments and fit in 3-inch hoops, which are perfect for hanging on the tree or using to decorate a gift. I love the pastel colors on these but you can use more traditional Christmas colors if you like.

This cute Christmas tree from Lagodargetoshop uses a single color and fits in a 4-inch hoop, but you could make it smaller if you wanted by trimming the last ornaments and gifts from the sides, or just stitch the tree without any other embellishments. Either way it’s a cute addition to your holiday tree.

Stitched Modern has a super cute collection of retro Christmas ornament cross stitch patterns from designer Gera. This is a printed pattern that will be shipped to you. Each pattern is about 40 by 56 stitches, or 2.9 by 4 inches/7.4 by 10 cm on 14 count fabric. To work the whole set you’ll need 20 colors of floss.

These snowflake ornaments from Our Little Handmade Home are each about 2.5 inches/6.4 cm when stitched on 14 count fabric, and they use a single color of floss. They are pretty in red but you could also do white on a blue or black background, or whatever suits your other Christmas tree decorations!

From the description it sounds like this set of vintage style cross stitch characters is presented as one large chart, but the photo from Sampler Antique Stitch shows each of them stitched up as their own little ornament, so it gets included here. You’ll find Santa and snowmen in different poses in this cute collection.

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