Stitchtober 2025

There actually wasn’t a Stitchtober list this year. For a short while it seemed as if there would be. In fact, Adam who had hosted the previous years Stitchtobers confirmed on Instagram that he was thinking he might do it again this year. But in the end he didn’t and since I had had the idea that I’d like to do it again using constellations, I went back to one of his previous lists from before I started participating.

In 2020 Adam’s list included all 31 days of October but I only wanted to do Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays like the list was in 2021 when I did it for the first time. So after taking out a few of the words that I knew wouldn’t work with constellations I wrote the others on pieces of paper and had my husband pick 14 of them out of a basket.

I was going to post my list on Instagram so I made a slide but I realized that, due to my design idea, I really wasn’t going to be able to stitch the constellations in the order I chose the prompts. This mobile, stitched by someone I follow on Instagram, was my inspiration for how to represent the constellations.

I knew I wanted to stitch them in a circle and through googling I found this cross stitch pattern.

After googling each of the prompts and deciding on which constellations to stitch, I began googling drawings of the actual constellations and drawings of the representations of them. I quickly found out that neither the actual constellations or the representations (or the stories that go along with them, for that matter) are consistent. So I picked the images I wanted to use and began arranging them in the large circle I had drawn on my pieces of taped together graph paper. As I began converting to x’s, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to stitch lines connecting the stars and that I was going to need to start stitching in the middle of the piece with Aquarius who was a response to the prompt “talon” which was number nine on my list. So I ended up posting the constellations on Instagram as I stitched them. Here are the first nine (from the bottom up) on my Instagram grid.

And here is the post of the piece with all 15 constellations. 15 because for the prompt “season” I stitched Orion and Scorpio who appear on opposite sides of the sky According to the myth, Orion hunts in the winter and flees in the summer when the scorpion appears.

After I had stitched all the constellations I added stitches to fill in the spaces a la the Kitties in the Round pattern and then I turned it into a pillow for our work/guest room futon.