Cross stitch pattern of an antique lace styled alphabet based on a design from the 1800’s by Harriet Cushman Wilkie. I’ve lovingly updated and standardized the pattern so that all the letters are the same style. I’ve also added in missing letters because apparently they didn’t need J and U in the 1800’s. Donate to my Patreon to access the PDF and PNG files.

Grid Size: 177W x 215H
Design Area: 12.50″ x 15.21″ (175 x 213 stitches)
Colors: 1

My Patron, Jess Williams, is a candle specter that will haunt a person by dripping wax on them day after day. The target can’t see the wax but they can feel their shoulders and head getting heavy and stiff until the weight of the wax stops them from moving and they become another candle in Jess’ collection.

The up side to having a hobby mostly associated with grandmas is that there’s a whole wealth of information that goes back hundreds of years, thousands if you’re not too picky about what counts as cross stitch. So it blows my mind when I see these patterns made by people from so long ago that are still readable today. They are awkward to follow and I have no idea what colors I’m supposed to be using, but the art is still there.

And a lot of it is surprisingly consistent for squares drawn on grid paper. It’s funny how sometimes I’ll see little dots of white ink poorly covering up a mistake and I’ll think Ctrl+Z wasn’t around back then. It was so much harder to design the perfectly mirrored letters with repeating elements without making a single errant mark. It makes me so grateful that I can just copy flip horizontal.

I want to encourage you all to try out some antique patterns. You might be surprised at how useful they can be. Maybe it will help you feel closer to your heritage knowing one of your ancestors might have stitched the same pattern.