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Whether you’re making a rainbow for Pride or just because you love color, this rainbow cross stitch pattern is quick and easy to make in an afternoon.
And if you don’t know how to cross stitch, you can learn all about it on my how to cross stitch page!
Supplies
To make a cross stitch rainbow, of course you need rainbow colors of embroidery floss. Here I just used what I had on hand; most are old J&P Coats colors. The purple is DMC 333, which the Internet tells me is “very dark blue violet.” Whatever.
The blue, yellow and red don’t have labels, orange is 1268 and green is 155, but these are clearly old numbers because they either don’t exist on the conversion chart I was looking at or don’t make sense.
This is a long way of saying use whatever rainbow colors you have. If you need to buy floss for this project you can get a good start from the popular colors DMC pack, or here’s a set of mostly rainbow colors.
You’ll also need a bit of cross stitch fabric. Mine is 14 count off white that I happened to have in my stash. The actual design is about 1.5 inches/3/8 cm tall and 2.5 inches/6.35 cm wide, so your piece needs to be bigger than that, depending on what your plans are for it.
Of course a sewing/embroidery needle and a little pair of scissors will be needed, too.
Rainbow Cross Stitch Pattern
You make your rainbow cross stitch design, you’ll need the chart, which you can screenshot or download to your device or print our in color. Because I use a knitting pattern maker I don’t have fancy symbols for the different colors so you’ll need the chart in color.
The good news is once you get started you don’t really need the chart at all.
If you start with the purple, it’s two sets of two stitches on top of each other, then you move over one stitch and do that again two more times. Then there are six stitches across the top, four above that and the stitches are the same on the other side relative to the top.
Then each next color fills in the two stitches next to the two stitches in the previous color, with that same repeat of six and four stitches across the top to make the curve.
The exception to that is I didn’t stitch the four across the top in red because I liked the look of the six better. Feel free to add them if you prefer.
I ended up turning this little bit of cross stitch into a cross stitch patch, but I haven’t figured out where to stick it yet. I’d love to hear what you’d do with the rainbow cross stitch design!
