Cross Stitch began on a leather notebook. I was hand-stitching a cover for a close friend and became interested in how cross stitch patterns render letterforms — each character built from X's plotted on a grid, decorative and systematic at once. The typeface translates that logic directly: every glyph lives within the same 7×7 grid, constructed from the same diagonal marks that make up a cross stitch pattern.

The constraint was the design problem. Fitting every character of the alphabet into an identical 7×7 grid without losing legibility or the decorative cross stitch quality required significant simplification — particularly for wider letters like W and M, and for characters with curves. Each decision was about how little you could draw and still have the letter read, while keeping the grid visible as the underlying structure.

At critique, reviewers consistently noted that the typeface read simultaneously as cross stitch and as early pixel typography — several compared it to the fonts in Stardew Valley and similar cottagecore games. That dual reading wasn't planned, but it made sense: cross stitch patterns and pixel fonts share the same logic of building form from a fixed grid unit.

The specimen was risograph printed in three colors — white, black, and a warm sage green. The photograph, a field of grass rippling like fabric, was chosen for its textile quality. The cross stitch corner ornaments framing the poster are built from the same diagonal mark as the letterforms themselves, so the typeface's structural logic extends into the surrounding design. It took approximately twenty to thirty test runs to land on the final: the color palette changed, the photograph changed, the bottom half treatment changed. The finished poster was exhibited at ATypI 2026.