By Cross Stitch Library · July 18, 2026
A cheerful penguin dressed in an orange floral Hawaiian shirt and straw hat, in clean pixel-art style — a playful tropical twist on a classic cold-weather animal.
Your pattern is at the end of this page, right after the stitching guide below.
A penguin that has clearly given up on the whole Antarctica thing, kitted out in an orange floral shirt and a straw sun hat. The joke is in the contrast — a cold-weather animal dressed for a tiki bar — and the floral shirt pattern is dense enough to be the real stitching challenge of the piece.
Penguin-in-tropical-gear is a sight-gag that works because it’s unexpected, and this design commits to it fully rather than just adding a hat — the shirt has its own repeating white-flower print across an orange background, plus the same straw-hat detailing you’d see on a real sun hat. It suits a beach-house bathroom, a tiki-themed kitchen nook, or as a not-too-serious gift for someone who collects penguin novelty items. Pair it with our capybara and coconut cocktail sloth patterns for a full vacation-animal set — see our funny animal round-up for more in this style. For a sweeter penguin design, see The Penguin Proposal.
At 60 stitches wide it’s narrower than most patterns in this batch, but the tall 83-stitch height and 22-color palette push it past true beginner territory. DMC 939 (Navy Blue Very Dark, 732 stitches) carries the penguin’s body and head, with B5200 (Snow White, 477 stitches) and 740 (Tangerine, 454 stitches) filling the belly and shirt — those three colors cover under half the design, so the remaining stitches are spread thin across the shirt’s floral print and hat detailing.
Work the navy body (DMC 939) and white belly (B5200) first to lock in the penguin’s basic silhouette, since those two colors alone give you a shape to build the shirt and hat against. The Hawaiian shirt print is the fiddliest part of this design — it mixes 740 (Tangerine), 720 (Orange Spice Dark), and 906 (Parrot Green) in small repeating clusters for the floral pattern, so work it one flower motif at a time rather than trying to fill the whole shirt in a single color pass, or the print will drift out of alignment. Several trim colors like 823 (Navy Blue Dark) and 702 (Kelly Green) appear only once or twice on the hat band — place those last, once the surrounding stitches make their exact position obvious.
Choose your paper size and color or black & white, then download the Penguin in a Hawaiian Shirt PDF chart and thread list — free, no sign-up.
