Letters from Hogwarts — SYOA

This started as SYOA — Letters from Hogwarts by Cunning Cross Stitch. From the original chart’s description:

This is a cross between a Stitch-a-long and a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story. Starting with receiving your acceptance letter, you’re going to the world famous wizarding school, Hogwarts. Of course, you want to share this experience with your muggle family back home, so you’ll be writing home regularly with tales of what you have been up to over the years. What you get up to will determine what pattern you stitch.

This is intended to be a fun way to run a Stitch-a-long that will be more personal to you the stitcher. You are of course more than welcome to adjust the final outcome of any of the patterns to suit your tastes.

The individual nature of your outcome does mean that such things like floss requirements will vary from person to person, and that test stitching every possible outcome is impossible. A new chapter will be released every other month and will contain:

• The letter home to your family
• Floss colours required for your outcome
• Multiple patterns (optional elements will have a separate key of floss symbols and requirements).

Some of the pattern drawings will be elements that will be inserted on top of the background pattern. In the case of the frame, the optional patterns will combine to be your wand. Bright pink (DMC 3326) points will be included in both the background patterns and the individual elements — these are your anchor points and are there to help you position the separate elements in your pattern. These themselves should NOT be stitched. It is recommended that you stitch the OPTIONAL elements first and then stitch the background, counting from the anchor points.

The chart has since been pulled from the designer’s site and is out of print.

This one was the pandemic project — there was a big Facebook group of stitchers all working their version at the same time, sharing modifications, swapping ideas, and generally turning the SYOA into a community sample-album. A lot of what you see here is the cumulative effect of that.

Things I changed from the original chart:

• Made it more full-coverage than the original was charted for, so the scene reads as one continuous picture instead of separated motifs floating on linen.
• The basilisk at the top left is my own design — wanted Slytherin’s monster represented somewhere on the piece even though it’s a book-two creature.
• The castle and the Norwegian Ridgeback dragon came from another stitcher’s modifications shared in the group — credit goes to whoever charted those originally.
• Fawkes (the phoenix at the top right, mid-burning) was lifted in from a Tiny Modernist biscornu pattern and reworked to fit the scene.

There’s a lot more going on than I can fit in this description — Diagon Alley shopfronts, the Three Broomsticks, the Hogwarts Express, the Sorting Hat, the Sword of Gryffindor, the unicorn in the Forbidden Forest, Professor Quirrell at the Mirror, a Gryffindor banner anchoring the middle, the famous letters from no one spilling out across the bottom. If there’s a specific element you’re curious about and want to know whether it’s mine, the original chart’s, or a community mod, reach out — happy to talk through any of it.

Stitched on 14ct tea-dyed aida with DMC throughout. The warm tea-stained background was deliberate — it makes the whole scene feel like an aged piece of parchment instead of fresh white linen, which suits a piece about letters from a magic school better than stark white would.

Finished February 3, 2022 — almost two years of stitching, including the whole pandemic stretch.