Stitch Historic Samplers from Fox and Rabbit Designs

I came across Fox and Rabbit Designs recently, and while they have a variety of cross-stitch designs to choose from, what most interested me when looking through their website is the patterns that are reproductions of sampler patterns first stitched hundreds of years ago.

For example, there’s the Botany Bay sampler, shown here, which was probably originally stitched by 10-year-old Margret Begbie in the late 1700s or early 1800s in Scotland. (Botany Bay was the original name for the Australian colony used in the UK.) It features ships, buildings and other symbols of the colony, and comes with an interesting backstory, too.

A woman named Margaret Begbie was sentenced to transportation to Tasmania in 1845, so it’s possible that’s the same woman who stitched about this far-off land and ultimately ended up going there herself.

There’s also Dorothy’s sampler, a Dutch design from 1792 covered with birds and flowers. The original stitcher is unknown. Or Elizabeth Cooper’s 1866 pattern that includes an alphabet and numbers, butterflies, birds, flowers, a greyhound dog, and a religious verse.

These projects are all so cool and it’s really interesting just to look at them, but it would also be fun to stitch them to allow their history and stories to continue. Check out all the reproduction samplers here.

Fox and Rabbit designs is an Australian company that produces cross-stitch charts and hand-painted linen. They have a Patreon where you can get more patterns, or you can buy individual patterns from their website. Many of them have the classic look of old samplers (they call them antique-inspired, which sounds a little nicer than old) but there are some with a more modern design as well.

If you want to learn more about them and see what’s on offer on Patreon, check out their Instagram page.

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Cross Stitch Samplers with a Historic Twist

A while back I made a little rainbow cross stitch pattern and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it, so I turned it into a patch. My idea was that it could be used on a jacket or backpack, or you could add a pin to the back and wear it temporarily on a shirt or elsewhere.

But what if you want to make your design more permanent? Is it possible to turn a piece of cross stitch into an iron-on design?

It turns out yes, it is, and Sirious Stitches has done it so I didn’t have to try to figure it out on my own.

The way they did it was by using HeatnBond, an iron-on adhesive that attaches fabrics without sewing. There was still sewing involved to finish the edges of the cross stitch fabric and make it look like a purchased patch. The post shows how to do this by hand or with your sewing machine. (I just did blanket stitch edging on mine, which doesn’t look like a “real” patch but is also a lot faster.)

Once you have the patch prepared it’s a pretty easy matter of using the fusible adhesive to the back of the patch so you can then iron it onto whatever jacket, pair of jeans, bag or whatever else you might want to add it to.

I guess I’m a little paranoid about the washability of cross stitch projects, though you could hand wash anything with an iron-on cross stitch patch as you might need to with a purchased iron-on patch, anyway. But this does look really cool and is a great option if you know you want to permanently add a cross stitch patch to a garment of bag.

Get the full tutorial over at Sirious Stitches. Would you add an iron-on cross stitch patch to something? I’d love to hear what you would use this technique for!

[Photo: Sirious Stitches]

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