Cottage Garden Free Cross Stitch and Embroidery Pattern

A free cross stitch pattern to make a sweet little cottage garden embroidery.

About a million years ago I used to design a lot of cross stitch patterns. Well, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration! In the 1990s and into the early 2000s I was a pretty prolific cross stitch designer. I started with check paper and my colouring pencils and then later moved to a very basic cross stitch design program for the computer. This was back in the days when your computer programs arrived in a box with multiple disks for you to load.

I had many designs published in needlework and cross stitch magazines and later designed a range of my own designs as kits which I sold at craft fairs under the name Sew Simple Designs. It turns out making and selling cross stitch kits is incredibly time consuming and with a young family it just wasn’t working for me. I sold my remaining stock as a job lot on ebay and that was the end of that.

The reason I’m telling you this long backstory is because yesterday I came across a couple of the kits that I used to sell when tidying up a box of miscellaneous craft stuff and thought it would be nice to share the patterns here for you.

Free Cottage Garden Cross Stitch and Embroidery Design

First up to share with you is this cute little flower border scene, I called this Cottage Garden.

I even found the stitched up sample that I framed and would display on my craft fair table back in the 1990s/early 2000s.

The design is mostly cross stitch but then has some additional embroidery stitches worked alongside or on top of the cross stitch to add extra interest and dimension.

Details of the Cottage Garden Embroidery Design

When worked on a 14 count Aida the design measures 9cm x 6cm (3 1/2” x 2 1/4”) If you use a larger count your finished embroidery will be smaller, if you used a smaller count your embroidery will be larger.

The design uses cross stitch, lazy daisy, back stitch and french knots.

All the different stitches are worked in 2 strands of embroidery thread apart from the backstitch to outline the butterfly which is worked in 1 strand only.

You’ll need 10 colours of embroidery thread, I don’t actually know the original DMC thread numbers that I used in this sample. None of the files from my original cross stitch will open now that software is obsolete unfortunately. What I have done is made an educated guess matching the threads I found in the kit with the current DMC colour chart as best I can.

Basically you want a dark green, a mid green, a light green and a grey green for your foliage. A few different colours for flowers, I used yellow, orange, light blue and lilac. Plus white for some more flowers and black for some flower centres and a little outlining of the butterfly.

You can change these colours to suit you of course, especially the colours of the flowers. For example those floxglove/delphinium/hollyhock-esk flowers on the left of the design would look lovely in 2 shades of pink rather than the yellow and orange that I used.

This design could be a great way to use up small lengths of thread that are left over from other embroidery projects.

You will need to stitch all of the cross stitch areas first and then work the back stitches, followed by the french knots and lastly the lazy daisy stitches.

Cottage Garden Cross Stitch Chart

Download a printable version of the Cottage Garden Design here:

Or you can right click on the chart below and copy and paste it into a word document. This is the chart for the cross stitch areas, work these first.

Then add the back stitch and french knots.

Finally work the lazy daisy stitches in lilac and green as shown below. This is an approximation of where the individual lazy daisy stitches go, it’s quite hard to draw them on the cross stitch chart! Just work them overlapping each other on the right side to give the impression of a buddleia bush and on the left side work some lazy daisies over the top of the green cross stitch, mostly covering the gaps you’ve left. Use your artistic licance with these, how many you do will depend on how big your stitches are and the effect you want to get.

If I were making this embroidered garden scene again I think I would try adding load more lazy daisy stitches on the right side and really build that up to give a fuller layered look.

I might also leave off the butterfly or maybe try to stitch a butterfly using 4 tiny lazy daisy stitches instead.

Feel free to play around with the design and stitch it however you want to.

I’ve scanned the original instructions which I included in the kits I used to make for this Cottage Garden Embroidery design just in case they are helpful. There are details on how to cross stitch, plus the other stitches needed for this design.

This sweet little embroidered garden scene can be framed, as I have here. It would make a lovely greeting card for a special occasion or be beautiful on a scented sachet.

Enjoy!

Julie

You might also like some of my other cross stitch designs: