Golden Puppy in a Knit Scarf Cross Stitch Pattern

About this puppy cross stitch pattern

It’s a chest-up portrait, the way you’d frame a photo of your own dog: soft brown eyes, a gentle half-smile and big floppy ears. The scarf makes it, a thick cable knit wound around the neck with tassels down one side and a little leaf pendant resting on the fur.

It’s a warm gift for a dog owner and a good fall shelf piece. Hang it beside the Red Fox Holding a Maple Leaf, which wears the same scarf weather, or the Hedgehog in a Knit Sweater for a row of animals dressed for the cold. Our fall animal round-up has more.

What you need

• Fabric: 14-count Aida in white, cut to at least 16“ x 18“ (3“ around the design for hooping and framing).
• Thread: 9 DMC colors, about 13 skeins in total, stitched with two strands. The main colors are 300 Mahogany – Very Dark (3,521 stitches), 729 Old Gold – Medium (2,980), 939 Navy Blue – Very Dark (2,967) and 435 Brown – Very Light (2,436).
• Needle: a size 24 tapestry needle.
• Stitches: full cross stitches only, with no backstitch.

Difficulty and stitching time

It’s rated Intermediate: a big project, but not a fiddly one. Six colors do almost all the work, and the three smallest (951, 783 and B5200) add up to only 80 stitches. The challenge is stamina and keeping your place in the fur, so it’s a fair first large piece if you’ve finished a couple of smaller charts.

At 15,783 stitches, expect roughly 160 to 265 hours at a steady 60 to 100 stitches an hour. Our guide to planning a large cross stitch project is worth a read before you cut fabric.

Tips for stitching this pattern

• Keep the navy outline. The outlines are 939 Navy Blue – Very Dark, not black. It reads as near-black on the fabric but stays softer around the eyes and fur, so don’t swap in 310 to save a skein.
• Stitch the scarf’s grooves first. The scarf is mostly 976 Golden Brown – Medium with 300 Mahogany – Very Dark in the cable grooves. With the 300 lines in, the plaited shape appears and the 976 fill is easy to count.
• Buy 300 from one dye lot. It’s the most-used color and runs through both the fur and the scarf, so a shade change would show in two places.

Size, fabric and framing

On 14-count Aida the finished design measures 9.4“ x 11.9“ (23.9 x 30.2 cm). On 16-count it comes out at 8.2“ x 10.4“, and on 18-count at 7.3“ x 9.3“. For the 14-count version, a 12“ x 16“ frame leaves room for a mat.

A cream mat and a simple wood frame make it look like a pet portrait, which is exactly what it is.

What’s in the free PDF

• A cover page and a one-page overview with a preview of the design
• The chart, split across as many printable pages as you choose, in color or black and white, with a symbol for every DMC color, center lines, a mini-map showing which part of the design each page covers and a color key on every page
• The thread list: DMC number, color name, number of stitches and skeins to buy for each color
• The finished size on 11-, 14-, 16-, 18- and 28-count Aida