Craft Book Shelf: 2001 Cross Stitch Designs

 

I love craft books! I seem to have a huge collection but that doesn’t stop me acquiring new ones every now and again. I have a couple of shelves of the bookcase dedicated to them and I love to just pull out a random book sometimes and get inspired by the projects.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to share my craft book shelf with you. Buying books online can be difficult when you can’t actually flick through them and assess whether you would make all the projects or not so I’m going to share some thoughts on each book, what drew me to buy it and why it still has a place on my shelf now. Perhaps I’ll be able to help you decide whether you need a copy on your shelf too.

2001 Cross Stitch Designs is a book that I have used over and over when I’ve been making cross stitch gifts for friends and family. It is a collection of charts for motifs and lettering that can be combined to create designs or used individually on items. For example, I have used a little cottage design beside a Bible verse to create a special wall hanging. Another time I used a cute ducky and a rocking horse on baby gifts. There is everything from small designs to quite large ones to choose from.This book is often my first stop for cross stitch inspiration.

All the motifs are in sections including Christmas, Florals, Nature Designs, Animals, Sports and Professions, For the Little Ones, Symbols of Love, Borders and Patterns, and Alphabets and Numbers. There is even a section called Australasia with pictures of Australian animals and flowers plus symbols of New Zealand.

Each chart covers two double pages. There is a photo of the chart stitched in full colour with ideas and inspiration of things to create with those particular images. Then there is the colour-coded chart and a key with thread colours in both DMC and Anchor threads.

Towards the back of the book there are basic cross stitch instructions along with specialty stitches, and blank grids in various shapes and sizes that can be photocopied to draw your designs. There are a couple of basic alphabets if you want to add names and dates to a project, and a couple of fancy alphabets as well. Some sections include themed borders, plus there is a separate chapter of borders. I have used these borders on bookmarks for quick gifts.

This is a great book to add to your library – one that I would highly recommend.

Disclosure: There are Amazon affiliate links in this post. This lets you see more information about the book, and if you decide to purchase it costs you nothing extra but I get a percentage from Amazon – which helps pay me to keep writing posts like this!