Christmas Cross Stitch Design
From LoveToKnow Crafts
A great way to get in the holiday spirit any time of year is to make crafts with a Christmas cross stitch design.
These projects are a wonderful way to decorate your home, or you can give little cross-stitched Christmas items to all your friends and family as gifts. They will love that you took the time to make them something and will remember you each year when they pull out their decorations.
Here are some places to find free cross stitch Christmas designs, as well as some ideas on how to make your own.
Christmas angels
There are some great cross stitch Christmas designs available at Told in a Garden. There are 20 lovely designs for angels and Christmas ornaments that would make wonderful gifts for anyone on your list.
These projects have full black and white charts and also include a color picture of what the finished product should look like.
Santa stitches
Craft and Fabric Links has a couple of great Santa designs from ABC Cross Stitch. These Santas would make great pillow fronts, or even stuffed Christmas tree ornaments.
Joyous wall hanging
Hints and Things offers a simple but lovely wall hanging that could also be broken up into different pieces. It says Peace, Noel, and Joy and also includes a couple of wreaths.
The lettering could be used to make bookmarks, or even stitched and attached to a plain greeting card to make a very special holiday greeting card.
Holiday hits
DLTK offers a Christmas tree pattern as well as a religious-themed design. These patterns are simple enough for beginners but also look really nice when stitched up. Again, these would make great images for greeting cards (though I don’t suggest hand-crafting all your holiday cards if you send out a lot, it would really mean something if you took the time to craft some very special cards).
A little bit of everything
If you don’t mind paying for patterns, Cross Stitch.com ahs a wonderful selection of Christmas cross stitch designs, from snowflakes to a partridge in a pear tree, holiday homes to nutcrackers.
If you plan to do a lot of holiday cross stitching, or you just do a lot of stitching all the time, the membership cost of this site is not that much. It is a lot if you don’t plan to use it regularly, though, so if you do invest in a membership, to this site or any other, make sure you check back regularly to get the most for your money.
Free Christmas cross stitch designs
If you don’t like any of the free online Christmas cross stitch designs and you don’t want to pay for a pattern, why not trying your hand at making a pattern yourself?
Even if you’ve never made a cross stitch design before, you should try this project. For a basic Christmas cross stitch design, it’s almost as simple as tracing.
I’m sure you or someone you know has a kitchen drawer full of cookie cutters. Somewhere in that drawer there are bound to be some Christmas cookie cutters. You’ll probably at least find a tree, a star and an angel, and maybe there will be some more complex cutters.
Choose a cutter in the shape of something you would like to stitch, then trace it on a piece of graph paper. Try to use as many whole squares as possible instead of just plopping the cutter down anywhere.
Once you have traced your outline, you can fill in the design with embellishments like ornaments for the tree, an eye for the reindeer, a halo for the angel. Add color by working with colored pencils if you like.
If you want to make your design bigger or smaller, take it to a copy shop and have it reduced or enlarged. This is a quick, easy way to make simple Christmas cross stitch designs that you can stitch all year long and use for wonderful quick presents.
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Comments
The make it yourself article was very helpful, as I am a beginning cross-stitcher, and thought it would be very time consuming and a very large ordeal to make a pattern myself. Thank you very much for your advece!
-- Contributed by: Anonymous
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