SBQ: Stitching Publications

The Stitch­ing Blog­gers Ques­tion of the Week:
Do you cur­rent­ly sub­scribe to any stitch­ing pub­li­ca­tions or have you in the past? (Either in print or online) If so, which ones?

I don’t sub­scribe to any at the moment, and I rarely buy them off the rack. I have hun­dreds of them in my stash, and I keep mean­ing to go through and just keep the designs I’m still plan­ning to stitch, but I nev­er get around to doing it! I stopped buy­ing them because I real­ized that I haven’t ever stitched one sin­gle pat­tern in any of those hun­dreds of magazines.

I was a “char­ter sub­scriber” to Cross-Stitch and Coun­try Crafts, and have about five years or so of old issues. I let the sub­scrip­tion lapse some­where around the time that it became Bet­ter Homes and Gar­dens Cross Stitch and Needle­work¹It was just Cross Stitch and Needle­work for a lit­tle while, too.

I love Cross-Stitch and Needle­work²For­mer­ly Stitcher’s World, and The Stitch­ery before that. and meant to sub­scribe but just haven’t ever got­ten around to it. I’ve bought sev­er­al issues of Jill Oxton’s Cross-Stitch and Bead­ing, and while I enjoy those, I don’t think I’d sub­scribe. The Gift of Stitch­ing looks interesting.

I’ve nev­er been big on Stoney Creek Cross Stitch Mag­a­zine, but I’ve nev­er been wild about their designs, either. I have a few issues of the old Leisure Arts mag­a­zines, but the cross-stitch designs they pub­lished were usu­al­ly too sim­plis­tic for me. I’ve seen some mag­a­zines from the U.K. at Bor­ders from time to time, but I don’t think any of the pat­terns in them have ever sung to my heart. It’s been years since I saw an issue of The Cross-Stitch­er, but it looks like they might have upgrad­ed a bit in that time.

I’ve liked a lot of the pat­terns in Just Cross-Stitch, but I’ve nev­er sub­scribed (and don’t buy every issue) par­tial­ly due to the very Chris­t­ian tone of the pub­li­ca­tion. I don’t think they want my pagan mon­ey. I do enjoy their annu­al orna­ment issue, and some­times I even remem­ber to look for it before they’re all sold out.

Look what I found while search­ing for the mag­a­zine sites! A search­able data­base of over 4000 pat­terns pub­lished in var­i­ous magazines!

By the way—how do you spell it? Cross-stitch, cross stitch, or some­thing else?