For years, I have passed by this gem of a Victorian farmhouse while driving the back roads of our county marveling at its proud character and stunning good looks.  The house has wonderful elements of classical architecture all scaled to a cottage size.  Seen in the late afternoon sun, the warm yellow color of the house makes an inviting picture indeed.  We hope you will agree.  To see what it looks like, click here.

Shirley Evers has a wonderful idea for expressing her feelings of friendship in her Mission TX neighborhood. She wrote … "I've been using the Miniatures - selecting 2 or 3 of my favorites in a row, then adding 'Glad we are neighbors' centered under the houses. My neighbors who receive them are extremely pleased. They are so pretty." What a lovely idea! We can only imagine the delight Shirley's thoughtful gesture must bring.

We are now offering kits of all our Victorian house designs. Each kit contains the charted design, DMC floss carded with color numbers noted, a needle and your choice of either 14 count Wichelt Imports Aida or 28 count Jobelan® antique white fabric cut to the appropriate size. We hope those of you who enjoy the convenience of a kit will welcome this addition to our line. Please see our Order Form for price information.

The Victorian House Postcard Set includes five house designs - "Fulton Mansion", "Pink Lady", "Roseland Cottage", "Simpson-Vance House", and "Westerfeld House" - and sells for $1.50 per set postpaid in the U.S. and Canada. Each card measures 4" x 6" and all are vertical format. The obvious use for postcards is for quick correspondence, however I've come up with another idea - a shelf ornament. You can make one by finding the middle of the card and carefully cutting out the top half of the house using a blade and ruler. Bend the excess back and stand it up on your shelf. Or, you could use several of these cut out cards at your next dinner party for truly unique placecards. They make great conversation pieces.

Cape May Victorians is the latest leaflet in our VICTORIAN MINIATURES series. It features six houses that are representative of the many hundreds of quaint hand-crafted frame structures that have been restored and preserved in the seaside community of Cape May, New Jersey. The fences and lampposts in this leaflet are also new. The design elements in this leaflet are to the same scale and are interchangeable with those in Victorian Miniatures, Victorian Side Streets, and San Francisco Scenes.

"The Abbey" is a Gothic Villa located in the seaside resort of Cape May NJ. Built as a summer home in the late 1860's, the house survived Cape May's many disastrous fires and storms and is now operated as an elegant bed and breakfast inn. The design is 80 stitches wide and 114 stitches high, and it comes in a leaflet with the completed design shown in color on the front cover.  To see a picture of the design, click here.

If you're planning a visit to Cape May, a "must visit" shop is Sharon Kraemer's Stitch By Stitch, 315 Ocean Street, Unit #9, Cape May NJ 08204 located in the charming Washington Square area.

    ADELE PARKS uses one strand of floss to stitch over two threads on 32 ct. Jobelan. Friends say her house designs look like watercolors. Where blending appears, she stitches a small swatch of the two colors together, then selects the best color match from her stash of many brands of threads.

    SYLVIA SUMNER worked her "Carson Mansion" design on sage green Aida. All those greens worked beautifully together.

    LINDA STEWART did her "Carson Mansion" all in blues (DMC 930, 931, 932, 3750, and 3752) with truly beautiful results.

    When it comes to personalizing house designs, JERRI ADAMS has a very creative and discreet way of doing hers. She stitches an "address" on each one, making it the date she finished, i.e., 1101 being November 1. She then adds the year with her initials at the bottom.

    HELEN REED is doing a reverse image of "Linden Hall" as a gift for her mother. She said it looked just like the house she grew up in Alabama. She remembers there were bats in the attic and the house also burned. Even though the house holds many bad memories for them, they now view it with humor. When she finishes the picture, she plans to sew bat buttons around the top floor of the house.

    KARLA BURNS, who has finished five house designs so far, adds a very unique, unifying element to her growing collection. The inner mats of each picture are black core and cut to follow the roof lines of the house.

You will be pleased to know Alex has completed stitching both the "Blue Victorian" and "Simpson-Vance House" and has generously prepared thread conversion lists to make available. The "Blue Victorian" was done in pale green colors that approximate the actual house colors. He used variegated silk, linen, stranded cotton, and pima cotton in his designs and offers some insightful tips for using these specialty threads along with his conversion information. Alex's expertise extends to many of the fiber arts. We greatly value his creative use of threads and his sharing nature. For a copy of his thread conversion(s), please include a note with your order, or send us a SASE marked "BV" and/or "SV threads". (Alex's thread conversions for "Carson Mansion", "Westerfeld House", and "Roseland Cottage" are still available.)

When I started stitching these houses in the mid-1980s, one big challenge I faced was how to organize the floss and keep it handy for stitching. I did this by making "thread keepers" out of pieces of cardboard. At the start of each project, I cut three to four pieces of cardboard about 4"x 8", number and label them, punch holes about 1" apart around three sides. I add threads with a larkshead knot (bend thread in half and tuck loop through hole then tails through loop) and their corresponding DMC color number as I go along. This allows me to park leftover lengths of blended thread in the order I've used it, making it easy to find the next time I need it.

My other essentials are a very fine #14 crochet hook for burying tag ends and a #20 tapestry needle threaded with a short piece of off-white Persian yarn to use for clearing the holes of these tag ends. When ripping out (back stitches in particular), I run the #20 tapestry needle under the stitch up to the needle's eye. The eye provides a safe slot for snipping the stitch that is well away from other stitches.

Some of the houses for which I have done cross stitch designs have their own web sites that you may enjoy browsing. Most include interior photos and some house history.

This section describes how to use the black and white charts in the Victorian Miniatures series to create your own color template. There are now four designs there, and we may add more as time goes by. We hope you will enjoy playing with coloring these designs, and that you will soon be able to color any of the designs in this series as it grows. If anyone comes up with color combinations they'd like to share, feel free to send them to us so we can consider posting your ideas. We welcome your comments and suggestions.

I have found Anchor® black floss to be a superior thread for back stitching. I wonder why it took me so long to discover this. Maybe I just hadn't done enough back stitching yet!

Natural light is the best light for seeing the subtleties in color variations. I find the light that comes through our large north-facing bay window is excellent natural light. It's especially important to me to use natural light when working with fabric and thread selection and later as stitching progresses. Then, when the lighting in an exhibit hall "does something" to the colors, I know the problem is with the artificial light source and not my color choices.

Beautiful, imaginative bird designs that show birds in their true, natural habitat may be found at Dan and Paula Minkebige's Crossed Wing Collection .