Browse all my cross stitch patterns here.
Last winter I designed and stitched my own cross stitch pattern – Polish Folk Nativity!
This pattern is based on one of my illustrations for Colleen Pressprich’s Marian Consecration for Families with Young Children (OSV, 2020) in which I set the Nativity in a shepherd’s hut in the Tatra mountains in southern Poland:
Of course, everything was reduced, stylized, and simplified to suit the different medium. I really love primitive, motif-based cross stitch designs, so I wanted to try to accomplish that look with my design.
On my own stitched sample I added the Polish text “Lulajże Jezuniu,” the opening line of a Christmas carol of the same name (it means “Hushabye little Jesus”), but for the published pattern I added options for English text “Silent Night” and Latin “Venite Adoremus” (“Oh come, let us adore”).
The other motifs include the Tatra mountains, sun and moon, snowflakes, the Star (sitting right on the top of the hut), fiddles, a basket, and a drum with a red cord. In the triangular window of the hut is a white dove. At the bottom a family walks through the snowy forest with their pet dog and sheep. The father is playing a ligawka, a traditional wooden horn used both for herding animals and (in certain traditions) during Advent and Christmas Eve services. As in my watercolor painting, the men are wearing Polish highlander folk costumes from the region of Podhale and the women are wearing costumes from the Łowicz region.
The pattern is a pretty moderate size – dimensions of 126×169 stitches and approximately 8,200 crosses total – and uses only regular crosses, backstitch, a few French knots, and some optional tiny beads in the border. It took me about 3 weeks to stitch it start to finish, but I was working on it pretty much full-time 😉 It is definitely doable by a complete beginner – the technique is very easy – but I recommend that people start with a small project like a bookmark first to see if cross stitch is something you enjoy in general before you invest in materials, because it is extremely time-consuming!
I stitched my sample on 32 ct Zweigart Belfast linen, but using 16 ct Aida would work just fine. It was a very fun project to design and to stitch! If you want to try it out, you can get the PDF pattern here.
