Craft Gossip

Independent craft blog since 2007

How to stitch an auto portrait

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bmw

Muddlepud came up with a perfect, manly needlework gift for her husband’s birthday. It’s a portrait of one of his favorite cars, the BMW 325ci. She says,

When he was gone I stole the photo from his computer, turned it into a line drawing in Photoshop, and transferred it onto a piece of fabric cut out of an old bed sheet. I used two strands of black floss (1 strand in the BMW logo) and went to town. It’s about 5.5 inches tall and 10 inches wide.

Brilliant! Father’s Day is just around the corner in the US. If you’ve been stuck for the perfect gift, why  not stitch up a framable portrait of your dad or husband’s favorite car.

Get the details from Muddlepud’s post.

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Cross Stitch Cards for All Occasions

I have never stitched a greeting card, but I kind of like the idea of it. It’s a card and a gift all in one, and hopefully one the recipient will hang onto for years to come. 

This collection of easy and colorful greeting card cross stitch patterns from Susan Bates (via Gathered) are a great place to start if you want to stitch your own greeting cards. 

These text-based designs cover a lot of card-sending events, such as:

  • get well soon
  • happy birthday
  • thank you
  • thinking of you
  • congratulations
  • anniversary
  • new home
  • good luck

The lettering is done in gradients and there are other details like hearts and stars, a house key and a gift, depending on the text. There are full cross stitches and back stitch on all of the cards, and they use 15 colors for the cross stitching and six for the back stitching (and just two colors are used for both, so it’s 19 colors total). 

The designs vary a bit in size but the biggest one is 52 by 67 stitches, which comes out to 3.75 by 4.75 inches or 9.5 by 12 cm when worked on 14 count fabric or 28 count evenweave. The text suggests beads are also used in the patterns but there’s no note of them in the key, so go wild and add some beads if you like. 

Designs are worked on a price of 6 by 8 inch/15 by 20 cm fabric and then mounted to a card with a colorful baking piece of card stock behind it. This is easy to assemble with whatever cardstock greeting cards you have on hand.

You can get the free charts as a PDF from Gathered. 

Have you ever stitched your own greeting cards? I’d love to hear about it, or let me know if these inspire you to try. 

[Photo: Susan Bates via Gathered]