Small St. Patrick’s Day Cross Stitch Patterns

There are cross stitch patterns of all sizes and for all skill levels of most kinds of motifs you’d want to make, and while there are plenty of detailed projects to make for St. Patrick’s Day, sometimes you don’t have that kind of time. So let’s take a look at some little St. Patrick’s Day cross stitch patterns.

I love these little minis shown in tiny oval frames. The design is from Bella Rose Craft and they really look like they need to be little pendants to me. The bigger shamrock is 15 by 14 stitches, which is a little more than an inch square (2.5 cm) on 14 count fabric. The one with stems is 12 by 19 stitches which is a little less than an inch wide and 1.36 inches/3.5 cm tall. They are shown in 1.5 by 2 inch hoops.

These sweet gift takes would be fun to add to a St. Patrick’s Day treat or to use as greeting cards or bookmarks. Designed by Cross Stitch by Coconut, there are five designs to choose from. Each design is 25 by 40 stitches and to stitch all of them you will need 12 colors. I think the leprechaun cat is my favorite.

Speaking of cards, this design from Easy X Stitch Patterns includes four shamrocks with a Scottish plaid design. Not sure the Irish would approve of that, but it’s still cute. Each clover uses three colors and is 26 by 29 stitches.

Lardoargento Shop has a cute collection of six little St. Patrick’s Day patterns (the rainbow one is shown here). They also have a sheep, a pot of gold, two pints of beer, a leprechaun hat and a horseshoe. I love the little border around the designs, but you could leave it off to make the project smaller if you wanted. These are shown in 4-inch hoops.

While they are shown in one project here, the individual motifs from this design by Tidy Patterns would be fun to use individually on projects. Each one is about 60 by 60 stitches, so not as small as the other ones, but cute enough to be included here. The full project uses 20 colors.

This little sampler style St. Patrick’s Day cross stitch pattern runs a little less than 4 by 4 inches (that’s 10 cm) with a stitch count of 48 by 46. This green saltbox house and its hat wearing sheep use 13 colors, and the pattern is from The French Giraffe.

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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