The STitch People Story
Started in 2011 as a way to cope with depression, Stitch People has grown to serve a worldwide audience of crafters looking to tap into their innate creativity.
Hi, I'm lizzy!
I was in my final year of college when depression hit me hard. As I looked for things to help me cope, I turned to a hobby I had learned from my mother and grandmother when I was younger: cross-stitch. It was simple enough to pick back up easily, and difficult enough to hold my attention when my mind started wandering to dark places.
While waiting for a doctor appointment, I came across an article in Martha Stewart Living about cross-stitch family portraits. I liked the idea, but felt the designs could use some tweaking, so I took a few creative liberties and developed a unique style of cross-stitch character that I really liked. I made my first Stitch People portrait—a family portrait of my immediate family, complete with pets and spouses—for my mom for Christmas that year.
Now, Stitch People helps stitchers all over the world make their own personalized and meaningful portraits to gift to family and friends. From celebrating birthdays and graduations, to commemorating life's big moments like anniversaries, retirements, and new family additions, a Stitch People portrait can be just the thing to help expand your creativity and bring you and your loved ones together.
Lizzy Dabczynski-Bean / Founder & CEO
60K+
Satisfied Stitchers
300+
Unique Patterns
14K+
Community Members
Our Mission & Vision
We’re on a mission to inspire limitless creativity! We believe everyone is innately creative (yes, that means 🫵 YOU!)—and we’re here to make it easy and approachable for stitchers to flex those creative muscles 💪 Our DIY cross-stitch patterns are designed to help you grow your skills, express yourself, and create something uniquely meaningful.
Designing your own cross-stitch family portraits is a small (but incredibly rewarding!) way to celebrate your loved ones, add a little joy to your space, and explore something new—just for the fun of it!
At Stitch People, we value joy, creativity, and community. We believe every person matters, and we work hard to reflect that in everything we do. (We also love pets!) Whether you’re picking up a needle for the first time or you’ve been stitching for years, there’s a place for you at our crafting table!
From Portraits to PAtterns
After gifting my mom my very first cross-stitch family portrait for Christmas, Spencer (my husband) encouraged me to try selling them. I started taking commissions online, and found a fruitful little niche—I made several hundred portraits for customers all around the world! While I enjoyed the actual stitching, I found that I really enjoyed the designing aspect, and started to build a library of reusable elements for myself.
I started noticing people pinning our photos on Pinterest with captions like, "Would love to try this myself!" I began compiling all my patterns, best practices, and tips & tricks from my years of making cross-stitch portraits into a 92-page book, Do-It-Yourself Stitch People, and we started taking pre-orders. We found a printer we could afford and shipped out the first copies of the DIY Book in October 2014 😍
From there, I started designing patterns and writing books based on what people were requesting—Farm Animals, U.S. Armed Forces, Occupations & Hobbies, and Backgrounds were some of the next several books—and we started the Stitch People Community group on Facebook. In 2018, taking feedback from the previous 4 years, I added about 100 pages to the DIY Book and released the 2nd (and final) Edition. To this day, the DIY Book is our best-selling and most highly-rated product!https://stitchpeople.com/products/do-it-yourself-stitch-people-2nd-edition
CONTACT US
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We're a small team, but we try to answer all emails within 24 hours! If you have a question, comment, suggestion for a pattern, or just want to say hi, we'd love to hear from you!
