Halloween Cross Stitch Ideas: 30+ Free Patterns to Stitch
Halloween cross stitch ideas for every level: one-evening ghosts and bats, a spooky sampler, vintage postcards and The Scream, all free printable PDF patterns.
There are still a few weeks before October 31, which is enough time for a small Halloween stitch or two, or for starting something bigger to hang on the wall next year. Every pattern below is free: each one opens as a printable PDF with the chart, a DMC thread key and how many skeins to buy. You will find them all on the Halloween patterns page.
The ideas are grouped by how much time you have.
One evening: tiny motifs with one to three colors
The quickest patterns are about 35 stitches across, so they come out around 2.5 inches wide on 14-count Aida. With only a couple of colors you hardly ever change thread, which makes them good first projects and good projects for a busy week.
- Spider: one color, about 500 stitches.
- Crescent moon: two yellows, under 400 stitches.
- Skull and skull and crossbones: three colors each.
- Tombstone, crystal ball and wolf: three colors each.
- Spider web: a single color, but thin lines, so count carefully.
Many stitchers manage 100 to 200 full stitches an hour, so a pattern of 400 to 1,000 stitches is somewhere between two and ten hours of stitching. Pick the smallest ones if you only have one free evening.
A weekend: the classic Halloween characters
These have a few more colors, which means more thread changes, but they are the same small size:
- Jack-o-lantern, ghost, bat and black cat
- Vampire, zombie and haunted house
- Owl, raven, coffin and witch's broom
- For trick-or-treat: candy and a rainbow lollipop
Each pattern page has a stitching tip written for that design, for example which part to stitch first so dark thread does not show through the light areas.
Make a set: a Halloween sampler
Small motifs look great together. Pick six and stitch them in a grid of three across and two down, leaving five empty squares between them. Six 35-stitch motifs with those gaps take about 115 × 75 stitches, which is 8.2 × 5.4 inches on 14-count Aida: a nice size for a frame or a cushion front. Count the gaps from the edge of each finished motif before you start the next one.
If you want to add a word such as BOO or a name, the cross stitch letters tool makes a matching alphabet chart.
Two or three weeks: vintage Halloween postcards
Around 1910, Halloween postcards were full of witches on broomsticks, black cats and grinning jack-o-lanterns. These four are in the public domain and make charming larger pieces, about 120 stitches on the long side:
- Vintage Halloween witch, from a Raphael Tuck card of about 1908
- Flying black cats
- A Merry Halloween, with three pumpkin-headed friends
- Witch and jack-o-lantern, lettering included
A long project: spooky masterpieces
For something to frame, try a painting or print that is old enough to be free to use. These are 20 to 30 colors and around 10,000 stitches, so expect several months of relaxed evenings:
- Edvard Munch's The Scream
- Utagawa Kuniyoshi's Skeleton Spectre, the giant skeleton
- Hokusai's ghosts: Kohada Koheiji and the Lantern Ghost
- Van Gogh's smoking skeleton
- Goya's Witches' Flight, Fuseli's The Nightmare, Waterhouse's The Magic Circle and Böcklin's Isle of the Dead
Our guide to stitching a famous painting explains how to keep 30 close colors in order.
From photos: pumpkins, a black cat and an owl
Four patterns come from free-to-use photos: carved pumpkins glowing in the dark, a pumpkin patch, a black cat portrait and a barn owl. The carved pumpkins are mostly near-black background, so on black Aida you can leave most of it unstitched.
Your own Halloween photo
Have a picture of your dog in a pumpkin costume or this year's carved pumpkin? Open it in the pattern creator and it becomes a chart with DMC colors in your browser. Patterns up to 60 × 60 stitches are free.
Fabric and finishing
Orange, black and cream Aida all suit Halloween. White designs like the ghost and the skull need a colored fabric so they show; if you go for black, read how to cross stitch on black Aida first. When the stitching is done, small motifs make quick cards, bookmarks and ornaments: see five ways to finish a small cross stitch.