Stitch Some Iconic Women for Women’s History Month

Women’s History Month is celebrated every March, but of course it’s always a good time to learn about amazing women from history and maybe make little versions of them in cross stitch. Because why not?

I shared a bunch of iconic ladies in cross stitch for Women’s History Month last year, and I wanted to try to find some more projects to share this year.

I love this little set of sort of chibi historical ladies from ThreeOOne Patterns on Etsy.

It includes 20 little figures, some of whom you definitely know and others might be less familiar to you. In fact the pattern listing doesn’t say who they all are so I’m not totally sure, but there’s definitely Mother Teresa, Amelia Earhart, Cleopatra, Sacajawea, Rosie the Riveter (OK, she’s not real, but still), Joan of Arc, Rosa Parks, Frida Kahlo, Wu Zeitan and one of the Brontes, I think, to name a few. There’s one that might be Josephine Baker? Maybe Ruth Bader Ginsburg? Hopefully each person is labelled in the pattern so you can know who you are stitching.

The full pattern is 196 by 308 stitches, which comes out to 14 by 22 inches or 35.5 by 55.8 cm if you use 14 count fabric. It uses 85 colors to stitch all of the ladies.

Of course you could just stitch a few of them or add one to a greeting card or another smaller project. I kind of like the idea of lining some of them up almost like a border on a project with a feminist quote or slogan. But having this whole set of amazing ladies on your wall would be sure to inspire you to greatness.

(And if you take a peek at the pattern and feel like you can identify more of the people, let me know. I think I know more of them than listed but I’m not totally sure.)

Grab the pattern from ThreeOOne Patterns.

[Photo: ThreeOOne Patterns]

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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