Lord Libidan View RSS

Cottagecore Cross Stitch – Did cross stitch just become trendy again? 29 Jul 3:02 AM (3 days ago)

Every month, fashionistas and trend setters around the world send around round-ups of what is hot and what is not. They’ve done this for years, decades even, but for the first time in a long time, cross stitch just came up.
And with it, we just became trendy again.

This Isn’t Our First Trend Cycle

This is far from the first time. In fact, throughout recent cross stitch history we’ve been trend setters. From the peak of the recession, to homely Ikea adverts, to the highs of the COVID years, or the recent Gen Z crafting spike.
Cross stitch has always been a hobby ‘of-the-moment’. Its trends peak and fall with ‘what’s hot’ of the moment, all the way back to the era of Catherine of Aragon when she did not bring cross stitch to England.

Cross stitch has always ridden broader cultural waves. This isn’t novel; it’s just part of the pattern.

Marketing Loves an Aesthetic, Not a Craft

I hear you asking then: “What’s different this time?”
And you’re right to ask!

See, unlike the past trends, this isn’t actually the hobby getting the focus.
In the COVID era and recession, people moved to indoor cheap hobbies. In the Ikea advert days, cross stitch was being used as an analogy for homely pursuits. And in the most recent Gen Z resurgence, cross stitch is just a fun hobby.

But this; this is pure marketing.

Cross stitch is being used as a visual prop. Maybe for “cosy” but more likely just for its design.

So Who’s Actually Picking Up the Needle?

This is the part I keep going back and forth on.

On one hand, the numbers back up what Canva’s Instagram post implied. Etsy’s own trend data shows searches for “beginner needlepoint kits” jumping 175% year over year.
NPR ran a segment in January about Gen Z organizing needlework meetups through Eventbrite, and the therapist they interviewed talked about it almost clinically: the repetitive motion, the serotonin, the anti-anxiety angle.
Fortune covered the same wave from the sewing side a few weeks later, describing classes filling up faster than instructors could schedule them and hemming tutorials pulling in millions of views on TikTok.
St. Louis Magazine did a piece on their local needlepoint shops seeing exactly this: shop owners saying plainly that it’s younger stitchers now, discovering the craft specifically as a way to put the phone down for a while.

So yes; people are showing up. That part isn’t manufactured.

But here’s where it gets more complicated.
Despite all that online noise, the actual craft and sewing retail industry has been shrinking, not growing. Revenue across US fabric and craft stores has dropped at a steady 0.7% a year over the last five years, landing around $5.2 billion in 2026, with big-box stores eating into the smaller specialty shops that would normally benefit from a wave like this. If cottagecore was genuinely bringing floods of new, committed stitchers into the hobby, I’d expect that number to be moving the other way.

And then there’s the needlepoint canvas market, which spells out something I think is closer to the truth. Retailers are seeing kitschy, quick-finish, humor-based kits sell out in a weekend, driven by TikTok unboxing culture rather than any real pull toward the craft itself. These are designed to be low-commitment on purpose, cheap, fast, and easy to photograph the moment they’re done.

So which is it? I don’t think it’s one or the other. I think both things are true at once. There’s a real, if smaller, cohort of new stitchers who found cross stitch through a cottagecore feed and genuinely stuck with it, the same way people always have, through whatever door happened to be open. And there’s a much larger group who bought the aesthetic of having stitched something, the finished hoop as a prop for the photo, without ever really becoming a stitcher.

The problem is that from the outside, on a trend round-up or an Instagram grid, those two groups look identical.

And yes, there is a lot of evidence to suggest cross stitch is far from dying (or maybe growing worldwide), but at what cost?

Does It Matter Why People Start?

But enough of my opinions and boring economic business review papers. The real question at the center of this is “does it matter why people start?”

I don’t know the answer. Maybe? No? Yes?

This once again brings up the question of gatekeeping cross stitch. If someone is having fun, does anyone have the ability to say “it counts” or not?

What Happens When Cottagecore Moves On

Buy at some point, Cottagecore will move on. Trends fade after all.
Does the craft keep what it gained, or does it snap back once the aesthetic rotates to something else?

The COVID wave brought new stitchers, new techniques, and even new styles to cross stitching. So who’s to say that this won’t, too?
 
Happy stitching,
Lord Libidan

The post Cottagecore Cross Stitch – Did cross stitch just become trendy again? appeared first on Lord Libidan.

Is Cross Stitch Still Dying? — 10 Years On Update Post 22 Jul 3:05 AM (10 days ago)

One of the most-read posts on this site is my “Is cross stitch dead?” one. It looks over 5 years from 2004 to 2015, showing the lofty heights of cross stitch’s most popular period in recent times, to its heavy reduction after the recession ended.
However, since then we’ve seen so much more happen in the cross stitch world. From magazines folding to major craft stores shutting their doors. So the question of “Is cross stitch dead?” once again comes up regularly on online communities.

But is it really as bad as it seems? I would argue that it really isn’t, and actually, cross stitch is getting its second wind.
 

The Trend Data

From the pandemic to the new normal

As you can see on the above graph, cross stitch searches on the likes of Google have fallen from the crazy highs back in 2004, but since then, we’ve stayed fairly consistent. There is, of course, the peak of the pandemic when we were all stuck at home stitching, but it’s a fairly flat graph.
So at first, I would totally understand you thinking this is bad news; but it’s not.

You see, the trend is actually going up since the pandemic, albeit slowly. But it’s what you don’t see here that really matters.

A 2019 study by The Handcraft Initiative¹ (Initiative-handarbeit) found that the total craft market volume decreased by more than 11% between 2014 and 2018¹. But we simply don’t see this in cross stitch. In fact, according to Etsy, searches for craft supplies increased 64% and searches for kits increased 221%. And several market research reports forecast continued growth in the global cross stitch market over the next decade, with estimated annual growth rates of roughly 4-5%.

That’s far from doom and gloom.

So Why Are People Worried?

Despite the boost in the overall market, at first glance, the cross stitch world does look a bit down. Anchor Threads sales slumped and were sold to DMC, XRX (a massive needlework event organiser) closed its doors, the super popular ThreadHeaven ceased production, and a whole raft of cross stitch magazines from major brands to independents stopped dead:

• The Cross Stitcher
• Cross Country Stitching
• Cross Stitch & Needlework
• Cross Stitch Crazy
• Cross Stitch Gold
• X Stitch Magazine
• Cross Stitch Collection

 
But once again, we’re missing something. This time, we need to think about those new stitchers.
Unlike traditional stitchers, this new cohourt, brought in from the pandemic, favour TikTok instead of printed magazines (Even if this does result in people often mistaking aida for water soluble fabric). They prefer buying independent patterns on Etsy instead of physical kits. They prefer to watch Twitch cross stitch streams instead of Flosstubes.
We’re not seeing the death of cross stitch, but instead we’re seeing it change.

Cross stitch went from “grandmother’s hobby” to genuinely cool

What Does The World Of Cross Stitch Look Like Now?

This is probably the most interesting point here. Cross stitch has changed, and many argue maybe not for the better. But it doesn’t matter if we think the overall hobby is changing, as there are communities out there that will always support us, will always find tools that we’ll use and want.
And this, in turn, is also being reflected in search.

That search bar from the start of the post doesn’t talk about the increases in specific searches.
Yes, “cross stitch” is searched much less often than in the recession and pandemic, but searches for specific tools are up 40%³, even my own DMC color chart gets over 140k monthly views (something that was unthinkable in 2016!), so we can see that the internet has changed the hobby already.

But that’s the thing; the history of cross stitch has always been one of peaks and dips, of men stitching then women, it being seen as a girls’ hobby and then a grannies’ hobby, and now, it being a truly online hobby.
 

So Is Cross Stitch Dead?

Nope. Not in the slightest. In fact, all evidence suggests that not only has it been increasing over the last 10 years, but the future looks very rosy for cross stitch.
 
 

References

1. Craft Industry Alliance write-up of Initiative Handarbeit report, 2019
2. Iniative Handarbeit craft innovations report from 2014 to 2019, 2019
3. Google Trends Dataset, 2026

Happy stitching,
Lord Libidan

The post Is Cross Stitch Still Dying? — 10 Years On Update Post appeared first on Lord Libidan.