By Cross Stitch Library · July 16, 2026
A bright yellow sunflower with a rich brown center, rendered in pixel-art style — a bold, cheerful motif for summer decor.
Your pattern is at the end of this page, right after the stitching guide below.
A single sunflower in bold pixel-art style, with layered yellow-orange petals ringing a speckled brown center on a short green stem. At 40 x 57 stitches it’s narrow and tall, so it fits well in a slim frame or stacked above another small piece.
This is a straightforward, high-contrast design that reads clearly from across a room even at its small finished size — the dark ring around the petals and the black outline throughout do most of the work of making the yellow pop. It suits a kitchen or sunroom, works as a quick summer-themed gift, and doesn’t need a large mat to look finished since the stem gives it a natural bottom anchor rather than floating in the center of the fabric.
Every stitch here is a full cross stitch, and the palette is dominated by just three colors — DMC 310 (black), 972 (Canary Deep), and 973 (Canary Bright) together account for 939 of the 1,423 total stitches, so the petals and outline carry the piece well before you touch the smaller shading colors. Five colors (3031, 909, 3371, 3818, 890) appear fewer than ten times each and are only used for center-shading detail.
Stitch the black outline first, then fill the petals with 972 and 973 before moving to the center — the outline splits the two yellows cleanly petal by petal, so you won’t end up guessing where one shade should stop and the other start. The center is the one fiddly part of an otherwise simple chart: it mixes six brown and green shades in a small speckled area, so work it last, in small sections, checking the chart every few stitches rather than trying to place all six colors from memory at once. Curious about the flat-color pixel-art style this pattern uses? Our pixel art cross-stitch guide covers what makes it different from a traditionally shaded chart, and our botanical pattern roundup rounds up more seasonal florals like this one.
Choose your paper size and color or black & white, then download the Pixel Sunflower PDF chart and thread list — free, no sign-up.
