Stitch Something for Your Mom with A Mother’s Love

I recently found this pattern booklet, “A Mother’s Love” in my stash of crafty books, and it would be a lovely thing to stitch for your mom or a mom in your life for Mother’s Day. (I know that’s far off but this is kind of a big project.)

Designed by Diane Brakefield, the project is a little bigger than 8 by 10 inches in 32 count and uses cross stitches, quarter stitches, backstitch and French knots.

The booklet includes basic instructions and tips for how to stitch the project, which features flowers, a bee and a butterfly, along with a house and the sentiment:

A mother’s love is like a garden where flowers sweetly bloom and the path that passe through them gently leads us back to home.

It’s really lovely, and the booklet can be purchased from Leisure Arts for $4.99 or as a digital download for $3.99.

[Photo via Leisure Arts.] Looking for Mother’s Day Cross stitch patterns and charts? Check these out on Etsy.

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Bee Cross Stitch Patterns

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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