Stitch These Hearts and Arrows as a Sweet Last-Minute Valentine

Of course hearts are fun to cross stitch and use in other kinds of art all through the year, but I couldn’t resist slipping in one more quick little, super cute heart project before Valentine’s Day.

The Cross Stitch Hearts & Arrows project from KBB Crafts & Stitches has a couple of little designs made to fit in rectangular pendants she found on etsy.

If you don’t happen to have any jewelry mounts to put your projects in, they’d also be cute on little cards or even as a bookmark, maybe stitched with the recipient’s name as well.

Have you ever made cross-stitched jewelry before? I’m still thinking about the cross-stitched cuff featured in this post about “cool” cross-stitch I shared last year.

[Photo via KBB Crafts & Stitches.]

Looking for more Bookmark charts and cross-stitch patterns? Check these out on Etsy

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Valentine's Day Bookmarks to Cross Stitch

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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