Cross stitch links

My re-found love of cross stitch had me trawling the web for useful sites, and I wanted to share what I’ve found.

Cyber Stitchers is a fantastic resource. Members have posted oodles of free patterns and photos of finished work, and there are other tools like a floss converter, fabric size calculator and even a little program that allows you to “underlay” an image of your choice on graph paper.

This caption maker at Crosstitch.com is just brilliant. You can enter your text, and choose to have it converted into a pattern from a range of lovely cross stitch fonts. I’m not sure how long it will be free, but for $12 a year for this, and unlimited pattern downloads (and there are lots), I’d say it’s totally worthwhile. I used this tool for a project I just completed (it’s a birthday present, so I can’t post pictures just yet), and found it really easy to use.

The counted cross stitch chart generator at Dark Lilac is wonderful. You can upload a picture of your choice and have it converted into a PDF chart, complete with DMC thread colours, that you can save and print. The resultant chart is considered the property of Dark Lilac under a Creative Commons licence. You’re free to use it, share it and alter it, but can’t sell it. Which sounds perfectly fine to me. I used this program to create a chart for another present I’m making, and I can’t wait to get onto stitching it.

One last site for fans of the tarot. I was googling around for a good image for (yet another) present, and came across Celtic Tarot in Cross-Stitch. There’s a set of 22 tarot-related motifs, one for each card in the Major Arcana. Some of them are really cute, and I think I’ll be turning my hand to the Unicorn before too long.

So that’s my link haul for the time being. Which sites have you found valuable for crafting?