Winter Word Art Cross Stitch Patterns

When the Christmas crafting is done, we don’t have to stop thinking about winter. In fact, the winter season has barely started in the Northern Hemisphere, so we’ve got plenty of time to stitch up projects celebrating winter and snow. These winter word art projects are easy and fun to stitch and give you something new to decorate with when the holiday stuff comes down.

As a lover of hand-knit winter things, this winter word cross stitch pattern from Non Stop Stitch on Etsy made me smile. All the letters are made out of or decorated with coats, scarves, hats and other winter gear. The design by Vitaliya Mishchuk measures 78 by 191 stitches and uses 17 colors or color blends. The intermediate pattern includes full and half stitches, backstitch and French knots.

Another fun project that doesn’t use totally traditional winter colors is Snow Means Winter from crossstitch.com. This 112 stitch square pattern was designed by Susan Saltzgiver and uses three colors and is rated easy.

This winter one is a little less wordy and a little closer to being a Christmas design, but I think it would be lovely to have in the house throughout the season. This one is from Historical Sampler on Etsy and features winter birds, trees and other symbols of the season around the word winter. It’s 18 centimeters (about 7 inches) square and the link is for the full kit that includes thread, fabric, the white frame for display and some other goodies.

As mentioned above, a big aspect of winter that a lot of people wish for (and others wish to avoid) is snow. If you’re in the let it snow camp, these next projects are for you. This one from X Cross Stitch features bold lettering and snowflakes and is 160 stitches square. It uses seven colors and if you visit the pattern on Etsy you’ll see lots of different color schemes, from blue to red to rainbow colors.

Faber Cross Stitch has a design with the same sentiment but a little less bold, with a simpler font and only using three colors. This one is 114 by 115 stitches and fits in a 9-inch hoop.

Next Pattern:

20 Snow Globe Cross-Stitch Patterns

I love the look of variegated cross stitch floss and how it makes it possible to stitch with a variety of colors without changing thread, giving your project more depth and a more complex look without you having to do anything different.

Or at least not much different. I recently came across this blog post from The Copper Fox all about how to use variegated floss and it noted that many people would say it’s a good idea to complete a whole stitch (when you’re stitching whole cross stitches) with the floss before going on to the next stitch. Most of us stitch row by row, but of course if you do that with variegated yarn, it could change color along the way and you’ll end up with stitches that are half one color and half another color or a different shade.

Of course that makes total sense but I’d never thought about it.

The post includes swatches with different kinds of variegated threads to show the different between working stitch by stitch or row by row, and it doesn’t make a huge different over the small area shown but I can see how it might make a difference if you had really long rows or if you just want to make sure your stitches are a single color whenever possible.

In addition to this experiment, the post talks about other ways to work with multicolored floss, including deliberately mixing the colors among the strands of floss you are stitching with and stitching in a different order instead of right to left and top to bottom (or whatever direction you typically work) to get different effects from the thread.

It’s fun to geek out on this stuff because it can make a difference if you want to play with it, or you can just stitch on without giving it much thought, and both will give you good results.

Check out all the experiments at The Copper Fox.

Do you do anything different when you stitch with variegated floss? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo: The Copper Fox]

Next Pattern:

Have you read?