Stitch Up Tiny Landmarks in Stamp Form

I don’t know if stamps are trending as a craft motif or maybe I’m just ahead of the game, but Pinterest has been serving me a lot of content in all sorts of craft genres having to do with stamps lately. We’re talking little stamp shaped paintings and sewing projects and, as you might image based on where you are reading this, stamp cross stitch patterns.

Maybe it’s because we’re feeling a collective loss of attention span lately and we need little, cute, satisfying crafts to get us through these long, hard days.

Or maybe the algorithm knows I’m a sucker for cute little satisfying projects.

Whatever.

One such example is this lovely little collection of 20 world landmarks stitched in stamp form. The design is from Teeny Weeny X Stitch and I’m not sure I can identify all of them off the top of my head (and the pattern listing doesn’t say), a few of them are the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, the Taj Mahal, the pyramids in Egypt (and a Mayan pyramid, too!), Christ the Redeemer, the Statue of Liberty, the Sydney Opera House, the Colosseum, Stonehenge, the Washington Monument and the Great Wall of China.

If you can identify more of them, let me know!

Each pattern is 40 by 40 stitches and they use between 9 and 23 colors depending on the location. They come out less than 3 inches/7.6 cm when stitched on 14 count fabric.

I kind of love the whole set done as one big piece, but you could also stitch your favorites as individual projects. How cute would a little Eiffel Tower be in your scrapbook about your trip to France (if you are such a person to travel to France and keep scrapbooks)? A little Leaning Tower of Pisa made into a patch to cover a stain on a shirt? The possibilities are endless!

You can grab the pattern from Teeny Weeny X Stitch on Etsy.

[Photo: Teeny Weeny X Stitch]

Review: Cute Kawaii Cross Stitch

Long ago when I was in 4-H, the club made a quilt for our leader when she was having a baby. It was made of green and white blocks and some of the white blocks had four-leaf clovers cross stitched on them.

That’s the one and only time I remember using waste canvas to cross stitch on fabric, but I think about it a lot when I consider stitching on other fabrics that don’t have built in blocks.

Using waste canvas allows you to superimpose a grid onto fabric so you can follow a cross stitch pattern and stitch on the fabric, then remove the waste fabric, leaving just the original fabric and the stitching behind.

It’s relatively easy to use, but it’s great to have a tutorial and some tips to work from the first time you do it. I think we were just winging it honestly but it turned out fine in the end.

There’s a great post with lots of photos over at Koekoek that shows you how to set yourself up for waste canvas stitching success, how to actually do the stitching and how to remove the waste canvas. They call that part fun but I don’t agree as far as I can remember. I think the tediousness of pulling out the waste canvas threads is a big part of what has kept me from getting more and using it in different projects.

I’d love to add a bit of cross stitch to some clothing, or to a piece of fabric to then sew into a pillow or another project. (They show a pillow in the blog post, but you could also do this to make cloth napkins, a tablecloth or any number of other projects.) Maybe reading all about it will motivate me to give it another try!

Have you ever worked with waste canvas? I’d love to know how it went.

[Photo: Koekoek]

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