Designer Spotlight: Banani Stitchery

If you’re looking for a realistic cross stitch pattern from your favorite dog or cat, you’ll want to check out Banani Stitchery. This shop is full of gorgeous designs for different breeds of cats and dogs, so you can stitch up a Norwegian forest cat or a red toy poodle or a great variety of other cats and dogs.

There are less accurate but still adorable kitten cross stitch patterns, as well as bunnies, mostly with a spring flair. There’s also a section called cute characters, which is full of other adorable animals like a owl on a stack of books, a teddy bear in the rain and a baby goat going to the airport with a coffee and a travel bag.

Many of their patterns are large, colorful and complex, but if that’s your thing there are a lot of beautiful projects here, too. I love this vintage baubles cross stitch pattern, full of classic holiday ornaments packed in a box. If you still use ornaments like this, or fondly remember ornaments that looked like this, it would be a wonderful addition to your Christmas decor.

The pattern is 160 by 197 stitches and uses a whopping 73 colors and one blend. The design comes out to 11.43 by 14.07 inches, or 29 by 35.7 cm. It uses full and half cross stitches as well as backstitch.

Another big category is flowers, where you will find lots of colorful, realistic looking florals. There are a few landscapes, vintage inspired designs like the one shown here, and collections of patterns you might want to stitch together, such as flowers in vases or little dogs.

If this sounds like your kind of cross stitch, check out all their designs at Banani Stitchery.

Know a designer you’d like to see in the spotlight? Leave a comment or fill out the form linked at the top of the page!

[Photo: Banani Stichery]

As long-time word nerd, there’s not a lot I like better than a pun. And what’s better than a pun in writing? A pun in knitting, because it really requires you to commit to it for as long as knitting the thing takes.

If you think that it’s not possible to knit a pun, please allow me to introduce you to the Plaidypus Cowl by Mary P. Hunt.

This is admittedly a pretty niche item to be sharing, but you know I have a thing for whimsy, and I don’t know that I’ve seen much lately as whimsical as a plaid knit platypus cowl.

The project includes three different plaid options for you to choose from, and while the pattern calls for sport weight yarn its suggested you could also use DK weight if you prefer something a little heavier.

There’s one size in the pattern, which makes a pretty deep cowl to fit a whole platypus (I mean plaidypus) on it. The sport weight version is 15 inches or 38 cm deep, which is definitely longer than the average neck. The DK weight one would be 17 inches/43 cm long and 27 inches/68.5 cm around, while the sport weight one is 23 inches or 58.5 cm in circumference.

That means it’s not easy to see what’s going on when you wear the cowl, but I actually think that’s part of the fun, too. When someone complements your cowl you can show them the secret!

I would also note that color selection seems to be really important in this project. Looking at the finished projects on Ravelry, on some it is easy to see the design and on others it is not. High contrast is important if you want the platy to be obvious, or you can choose an option that makes it blend in if you want.

You can see finished projects and grab the pattern for your own on Ravelry.

[Photo: Mary P. Hunt]

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