Money is tight everywhere, and embroidery can be an expensive hobby!

However, with a little searching, you will find some great freebies on the internet. Many of your favourite embroidery magazines have a website, and offer free projects or mini-projects and all you need to do is register.

Of course, you must always be careful about anything you download to ensure that there are no hidden nasties. It’s for this reason that the links I have given you are ones I know that personally I can trust.

For many of these, you only have to register to become a member of the site – and some of them have a newsletter that comes out and advises of any new freebies.

The majority of these are cross stitch – because that seems to be the freebies that are added. However, if you look through the pages, especially on some of the generalist embroidery offerings, and you will find other designs.

Cross-Stitching.com. This is a favourite site of mine, and they have lots of themed free patterns in PDF format to download. Most of them are greeting card sized and are suitable for beginners and upwards.

Dragon Dreams – if you like dragons, then you will love these adorable Dragon Dreams dragons! I love them all, and have several stitched.

DMC Join the DMC club for access to hundreds of free charts, patterns and projects. Also click on their “brochures” link and you will find some free charts under there, as well as under their “inspirations” link! If you can’t find something to stitch here, you won’t find it anywhere!!

Country Bumpkin You all know Country Bumpkin – publishers of “Inspirations” magazine. Well, hidden away in their website are some very nice free designs for you to stitch – and not just cross stitch either!

Piecework Magazine. Piecework is now part of the Interweave group, and so the magazine is now available on iPad. However, on the website, you can download instructions to some of the projects.

Ellen Maurer-Stroh is a designer of some very lovely pieces. She has kindly put some free patterns up on her website. If you enjoy stitching one or more of them, please do the right thing and buy one of her other charts.

Better Homes and Gardesn have some interesting projects hidden in their pages.

I hope that you enjoy stitching the projects you find on these pages. I do ask that you do the right thing and don’t print/distribute/publish them. By all means – share the links, but please respect that designers have put a lot of work into them.

Is there anything that you would particularly like to see an article on? If so, please contact me with your suggestions.


© 2013 Megan McConnell