Cross Stitch Book

I love this book, it's so funny and the patterns are awesome but there is ONE HUGE ISSUE. Any pattern that is on a white background but contains large areas of Black does not add contrast to the grid in the black areas. This makes you essentially blind in those areas and having to rely on your own estimates as to how many pixels a given area is. You absolutely WILL mess up and you will hate yourself and you design for it.

Bought this as a complete beginner, and it was reasonably beginner friendly. The explanations and instructions were pretty good. Personally I probably would have liked it to be a little bit more thorough but I understand if it wasn't intended to answer every question you'll have and more intended to just get you going by covering the basics, which it did well. Toby Fox's addition of in-character captions and remarks is charming as all heck. There's a huge variety of patterns and even more online (the site is in the book). There were also tons of example pictures of various applications and projects so you know what a pattern will look like and to give you some ideas to work with. The one and only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is because the first larger project I started working on has errors in the pattern that I didn't notice until after I had already stitched them. 2 letters aren't spaced correctly, having extra spaces or missing a space. When compared to the example picture, those errors aren't there so it's clearly a typo in the pattern. It's not SUPER obvious, but it does look a little off and once you see it you can't unsee it. I'm trying not to approach this hobby as a perfectionist, but I'm a little worried going forward that I'll have to check the patterns more carefully. To me, having to seam rip and fix mistakes is the worst part of cross-stitching so when I'm putting so much effort into following a pattern correctly (not my strong suit) only to find out it had a mistake it's frustrating. Not a deal breaker by any means, I love the book and there are soooo many patterns. It's been really fun and Toby's contribution of character remarks is delightful.

Got this and the Stardew Valley one for Christmas and there are so many great patterns! I can tell that I'm going to have so much fun with this. I have been cross-stitching for a few months, but this would also be great for someone who has never done it before as it has great tutorials and suggestions for those who are new to it. I would love for more of these to be made for different games!