Have you heard? CrossStitcher is celebrating its 20th Birthday!

As a special treat, Emily Peacock has designed a Happy Birthday cross stitch pattern, and they're gifting it to our lovely blog-readers (I know, we’re too good to you). This fab free chart also fits pretty neatly in with our embroidery month celebrations.

The best bit is that it’s not just suitable for momentous magazine birthdays, it’ll be pretty handy for regular people birthdays, too! If you need another reason to crack the needle and thread, their Easter-themed 250th Issue has a whole heap of frankly awesome patterns to inspire you – including delicious cupcake designs from Tinou le Joly Sénoville. Nom. You can buy Cross Stitcher issue 250 here or download the digital issue for your phone or tablet.

And don't forget you can download more Emily Peacock charts over on our main site.

Here's a little Friday freebie for you! As part of our embroidery month celebrations, Carina from happy-making embroidery website Polka & Bloom is offering a free pattern to three lucky followers of The Making Spot! 3 lucky winners will get their pattern of choice aboslutely free! Read on to find out how to enter...

Our embroidery month series is in full swing! To continue our celebration of all things stitchy, we’ve rounded up the loveliest embroidery projects we can find…

As part of our embroidery month series, we've delved into the stitchtastical mind of Mr X Stitch. The King of all things weird and wonderful in the craftiverse, he's just gathered up his favourite boundary-pushing stitchers and featured them in his book PUSH Stitchery (including the wonderful Gillian Bates, creator of this beach hut canvas). Read more to see what he's been up to lately & find out the strangest surface he's ever seen stitched!

Hi everyone! My name is Floresita and I edit a wonderful craft blog called Feeling Stitchy - maybe you’ve paid us a visit? If not, I’d love to see you all there sometime - we’re a group blog that features projects, tutorials, books, and photos on the topic of embroidery and craftiness. I’m super-honored to be guest posting on The Making Spot today! Today I’m going to show you the basics of Couching (as I understand it). If you’ve never tried couching before it’s a wonderfully easy stitch that will add a lot of texture and color to your work. Without further ado: Couching 101!

February is embroidery month, and we love the chance to fly the flag for all the oh-so-talented stitchers in the craftiverse! So we're hosting a week of daily posts filled with all the lovely people & websites who inspire us to have fun with thread. To kick start the week, we chat to Emily Peacock, who has led the way in making tapestry trendy again with her bright designs. She also happens to be one of our favourite designers over on The Making Spot.