Christmas is nearly here and I wanted to add some geeky craftiness to our tree this year, so I decided to make some geeky cross stitch ornaments. I looked online for patterns, went down a bit of a pinterest & google image black hole, and found a whole bunch of perler/ hama bead ornaments that were seriously cool, but not a lot of cross stitch patterns for what I wanted.
So, of course, I decided to create some. And, of course, once I had designed one or two, I designed more. Suddenly I had Mario, Luigi, a star in a Santa hat, Yoshi’s egg wrapped in a bow, a festive question block gift, and a whole load of power up mushrooms. I may have gotten a bit carried away…
To turn these patterns into ornaments for your tree, you just need a few things; vinyl or plastic canvas, sticky back felt, ribbon, and a hot glue gun – as well as the typical cross stitch bits – so the required colours of thread/floss, a needle, and some sharp scissors. Here is a list over on Amazon of some of my essentials for this project.
I used vinyl canvas as it has some flexibility, is easy to cut though won’t fray or fall apart, and was really easy to work with. If you want a stiffer ornament you could use plastic instead, but I would imagine it is a tad harder to cut neatly.
Once you have stitched your bauble design, simply cut it out (on the vinyl aida I used a one stitch margin around the stitches) and hot glue a loop of ribbon to the top of the back. Then, stick this onto the sticky back felt and trim that to the size of your bauble.
You could also skip the felt and make the bauble double sided, by stitching a mirror image of the pattern and hot gluing them back to back with a ribbon loop between them.
So far I have stitched two of my designs, but I’m hoping to do a good half dozen before we put the tree up.
Download your free patterns
22 Super Mario themed Christmas bauble / ornament cross stitch patterns, including Mario, Luigi, star, Yoshi’s egg, question block gift, and many types of power up mushrooms.
Updated to include a Yoshi Bauble by request!
