Tiny Cross Stitch Patterns

As much as I want to be the kind of cross stitcher who does lots of big, involved projects, that’s really not who I am. I love tiny cross stitch patterns, which are quick to make, don’t require a lot of supplies, and can be used in lots of cute ways.

Earlier this year I made magnets with itty bitty cross stitch pieces in them, and since then I’ve been on a mission to stitch more little cross stitch patterns.

Another great thing about them is that you can buy a whole lot of mini cross stitch patterns in sets, often for a similar price that you’d pay for one larger design.

Take this set of 100+ mini cross stitch patterns from Samwise Simple Stitch. It’s full of seasonal designs including summer, Halloween, Christmas and back to school, so you could stitch these little designs onto projects for most of the year and only pay for them once. If you like to do cross stitch or embroidery that chronicles your year this would be a great set to help with that.

Or take a look at this set of 300 2-inch (5 cm) designs from Cross Stitch by Coconut. These are designed to appeal to kids so there are lots of things like mermaids, dinosaurs, diggers, bugs, food with faces, baby motifs and a lot more. These would be fun to stitch sampler style to decorate a kids room, or use on bibs, greeting cards, bookmarks and more.

And of course there are whole shops devoted to little cross stitch designs, like Teeny Weeny X Stitch. They have tons of bundles of little patterns, as well as individual projects you can buy, but how about a tiny 50 states as an example? Each state is less than 40 by 40 stitches, so they come out smaller than 3 inches/7.6 cm each. You can stitch up the states you like or make a long-term project of stitching the whole country, one small cross stitch design at a time.

Do you like tiny cross stitch patterns? And what do you consider small if you do? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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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