Customize Your Cross-Stitch: Friends and Family: Learn to Customize, Prepare, Stitch, and Finish Your Very Own Personalized Cross-Stitch Creations

Dabczynski-Bean (Stitch People Weddings), whose company, Stitch People, creates custom cross-stitch family portraits, presents a lighthearted guide on how readers can personalize 12 cross-stitch scenes to represent their own families and friends. The playful designs focus on domestic life, portraying a quartet gathered in front of a couch for a “family night in,” a couple with a baby in a nursery, and a duo perched on a stoop. Other scenes show friends enjoying such activities as gathering at a coffee shop, taking a yoga class, and driving down a palm tree–lined road. To customize the scenes, Dabczynski-Bean notes that the cartoonish figures’ heights can be adjusted by adding or removing rows from legs, torsos, and arms. She shows how to use different stitching techniques to add eyelashes or a white sparkle in the eyes and includes patterns for various hairstyles, fonts (for writing “we love grandma and grandpa” in the “Grandparent Appreciation” scene), and cats and dogs. Beginners will appreciate Dabczynski-Bean’s encouraging tone (“I promise you can do it,” she writes) and uncomplicated designs, which use a simple, easy-to-adjust grid system. Readers will adore this. (Nov.)