The history of Lyndisfarne Cross Stitch

Lyndisfarne is a small business which I run with support from my family. I have run the business ever since the founder – my mum Julia – died in 2010. She had been doing Cross Stitch for many years but always found it difficult to find designs that she really liked. She started designing them for herself and this rapidly turned into a business. She began designing charts by hand to meet individual requests, but found it very difficult to charge for the extra time taken to do bespoke designs. The next big step was to start using the computer, and she moved onto using Colin Fulford’s excellent ‘Easy Cross’ computer design package.

Mum read a lot of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books and was impressed by the wonderful artwork of Paul Kidby, Josh Kirby and Steven Briggs. She approached Terry and he granted her a license to produce Cross Stitch designs based on the Discworld. This means that we pay royalties for using the artwork and the Discworld trade mark. However, the characters are special and more than worth it – take a look at Pale Rider and the Librarian. It is a practice she repeated with material from the National Railway Museum and Newcomers Gallery. For the other ranges she used other high quality art work. Many of the birds came from paintings by Edward Lear.

Mum concentrated on designs that she liked and that fill a hole in the market rather than designs for purely commercial ends and we hope that is what makes our range different. That and the quality of the design – I hope you agree.

I have added my own designs to the collection over the years and continued the work that mum started.

Quality

It is my aim to supply high quality kits. I want you to be content with both the product and the service and I do all I can to achieve that.

I produce high quality cross stitch kits. The design is the most important element. However, on top of that charts are individually laser printed at a sensible size on quality paper. They are designed to stand up to being used while sewing, and I use colour to make picking out the back stitch easy.

Here are some sample pages (PDF, 2.4 MB) from part of the Discworld Mapp Chart.