Halloween Cross Stitch: 17 Bookmark Designs for the Spooky Season
We look forward to October all year.
Not for the plastic skeletons and the fog machines — for the other Halloween. The one made of candlelight and dark evenings, of a cup of tea going cold beside you, of the season when everybody suddenly wants to read something with a raven in it. That Halloween has been good to us. Over the years our Kyiv studio has quietly built up a whole shelf of designs for it, and this year we finally counted them: seventeen bookmarks and one larger piece.
So this is not a general article about the history of Halloween with a few kits bolted on at the end. This is how a small embroidery studio actually spends its October — which designs we reach for, why they look the way they do, and how to get one finished while the season is still on.
Where the imagery comes from
Every motif on these bookmarks has a reason to be there, and most of the reasons are older than the holiday as anyone now celebrates it.
The oldest layer is Gaelic. Samhain marked the end of the harvest and the start of winter, and it turns up in medieval Irish literature as a time when the boundary between this world and the other was considered thin. Later, the Western church settled All Saints’ Day on 1 November, which made the evening before it All Hallows’ Eve — and eventually, worn down by a few centuries of pronunciation, Halloween. You will often read that the church placed All Saints over Samhain deliberately, to overwrite it. It is a tidy story, and historians are a long way from agreeing on it.
The lanterns came from Ireland and Scotland, where people carved faces into turnips and beets. Pumpkins took over in North America for the simplest of reasons: they were everywhere, and they were far easier to hollow out. The costumes descend from guising, where children went door to door in disguise and performed something — a song, a rhyme, a trick — in exchange for food or coins. Trick-or-treating is its American grandchild.
And the visual language most of us picture — the grinning jack-o’-lantern, the black cat with its back arched, the witch’s silhouette against a full moon — was largely fixed in place by American greeting cards and decorations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is genuinely modern. It is also, as it happens, almost perfectly suited to counted cross stitch: strong shapes, flat colour, high contrast, everything readable at a small size.
That is why these designs work. Somebody had already done the hard part of simplifying them, a hundred years before anyone charted them onto a grid.
Why a bookmark is the right October project
Here is the awkward truth about seasonal embroidery. A framed Halloween piece for the wall is a beautiful idea in July. Started in the second week of October, it is a beautiful idea you will be finishing in November, with the pumpkins already going soft on the porch.
Stitching takes the time it takes. That is most of its appeal — but it does mean that if you want something ready for the 31st, the format has to be honest about the calendar.
A bookmark is. It is 6 × 19.5 cm of 16 count Aida, nine to fourteen colours, and the background is not stitched solid — our kits are partly stitched, so you are filling the design and leaving the white fabric to do its work. Most people finish one over two evenings. Some finish one in a single long evening with something on in the background.
And there is a second reason the format fits, which took us an embarrassingly long time to notice ourselves. October is not only decorating season. It is reading season — the month when people pull the gothic novels and the ghost stories back off the shelf. A bookmark is the one piece of Halloween decoration that lives inside that ritual rather than beside it. Look closely at our darker designs and you will see ravens perched on open books, owls above candlelit pages, a manuscript lying open under a crescent moon. The motif and the object are the same thing. A raven sitting on an open book, sitting in your open book.
That is not a marketing line. It is just what happens when you make bookmarks for readers.
Two halves of the same holiday
When we laid all seventeen designs out on one table, they sorted themselves into two piles without any help from us.
One pile is bright: orange and black, friendly ghosts, grinning pumpkins, lettering. It is Halloween the party — the one with the doorbell going and a bowl of sweets in the hall.
The other is dark: candles, moons, towers, ravens, a cauldron. No party at all. It is Halloween the mood — the long evening, the good book, the single candle.
Most people know immediately which pile is theirs. Some want one of each.
Halloween as a party
Nine designs, and none of them takes itself too seriously.
| Design | What is on it |
|---|---|
| Boo! | a small ghost in a witch’s hat, reading |
| Trick or Treat | a spider on its web, sweets, a lollipop |
| Halloween Pumpkin | a haunted house under a crescent moon, bats, a jack-o’-lantern |
| Pumpkin Ghost | a wide-eyed ghost rising out of a pumpkin |
| Halloween Owl | a round purple owl perched on a jack-o’-lantern |
| Halloween | the word itself, built from black cats and bats |
| Love | four black cats arranged into a word |
| No chance in hell | a black cat holding its ground on a pumpkin |
| Read More Books… | a pale ghost with a book and firm opinions |
A note on two of these. Boo! and Read More Books… are not frightening in the slightest — the ghosts are cheerful, and the palette is soft. Plenty of people like October but would rather not have anything genuinely creepy sitting in their book. These two are for them, and so is Love, which is really a black cat design wearing a Valentine’s word.
Halloween as a mood
Eight designs, and a completely different register: deep colour, candlelight, night.
| Design | What is on it |
|---|---|
| Magic Raven | a raven on a bare branch above an open book and a candle |
| Magic Night | a dark tower under a full moon |
| Owl Spell | a white owl above a cauldron, violet flame beneath |
| Magic Skull | a skull crowned in violet fire over three candles |
| Bat | a bat crossing the moon above a lit candelabra |
| Wise Owl | an owl standing on an hourglass |
| Night Owl | an owl keeping watch over an open book |
| It’s Just a Phase | the phases of the moon, and a small joke |
It is hard to look at Magic Raven and not hear Poe. That is no accident on our part — a raven on a branch, a raven near an open book, a raven anywhere at all has meant one particular thing in English since 1845, and the design leans into it happily. Much of this half of the table works the same way. It is the visual furniture of gothic fiction: the tower, the candle, the hourglass, the bird that will not leave.
These are also the ones that keep selling after the pumpkins have gone. They are not really Halloween designs at all — they are gothic ones, and a tower under a full moon is just as at home in January. If your shelves lean towards old libraries, candlelight and things with feathers, this is your half of the table, and you can stitch it whenever you like.
Wise Owl and Night Owl deserve a particular mention. Neither has a single Halloween motif on it. An owl on an hourglass and an owl over an open book are simply what a certain kind of reader wants at their side, and October is when they finally go looking for one.
How to finish a cross stitch bookmark
This is the question we are asked most often, and usually by someone who has just finished the stitching and is now staring at a rectangle of Aida wondering what happens next.
With our kits, less than you would expect. There are two pieces of fabric in the box, not one. You stitch the design on the first. The second is the backing, and it is already cut to match — nothing to buy, nothing to source, no trip for felt. The printed instruction leaflet inside walks through the assembly step by step, and the join itself is a buttonhole stitch worked around the perimeter, which is also what gives the finished edge its neat ridged border. It is listed among the techniques on every bookmark kit page, and it is far easier than it sounds.
After that, everything is taste:
- A tassel. Made from leftover floss, and the most traditional finish. Two colours twisted together looks better than one.
- A ribbon. A narrow satin loop through the top corner. Quicker than a tassel and a little more formal.
- A bead. A single glass bead on the cord, which catches the light when the bookmark hangs out of the book.
We have written a fuller step-by-step guide to bookmark finishing separately, for anyone who wants the detail rather than the summary.
Not only in a book
A few things our stitchers do with these that we did not anticipate:
- Party favours. Small, flat, handmade, and far more likely to survive the week than a paper bag of sweets.
- Book club exchanges. Everyone stitches one, everyone swaps in October. This is apparently a whole thing.
- A first project for a child. Short, forgiving, and finished before interest runs out — with an adult on the buttonhole stitch at the end.
- Kept blank on purpose. More than one person has told us they stitch the design and never put it in a book, because it ends up pinned above the desk instead.
If you want something bigger
One design here is not a bookmark, and it is the one we would point you to if you have a few weeks and want something for the wall.
Death’s Head Hawkmoth is 20.5 × 21 cm on 14 count white Aida, eleven colours, partial fill. The moth is real, the skull-shaped marking on its back is real, and it has been carrying an outsized reputation in fiction ever since.
Be straight with yourself about the timing. This is two to four weeks of evenings, not two. Start it in the middle of October and you are stitching a Halloween piece in November — which is fine, if you know that going in. Start it now and you will make it.
Samhain and the Day of the Dead
Three holidays land within two days of each other, and they get mixed up constantly.
Samhain is the oldest of the three and the root of much of the imagery above. It is also, for a great many people today, a living observance rather than a historical footnote — which is why we gave it its own bookmark in our Wheel of the Year collection, and why it gets its own article rather than a paragraph here.
Día de Muertos is not Mexican Halloween, whatever the internet tells you. It falls on 1 and 2 November, it is a distinct living tradition, and its skulls are decorated, celebratory things rather than frightening ones. It also gets its own article, and its own designs — a Feliz Día de los Muertos bookmark and a larger Skeleton Lovers piece.
Different holidays, different meanings, two days apart. Worth keeping straight.
Questions we get asked
How long does one bookmark take?
Two evenings for most people. The designs are partly stitched — you are not filling a solid background — so the hours go further than the size suggests.
Is this suitable for a complete beginner?
Yes, and it is one of the better first projects there is. Full cross stitch in two strands, back stitch for the outlines, and buttonhole stitch at the end. Everything is charted and everything is explained in the leaflet.
What comes in the kit?
A colour chart, 16 count white Aida — two pieces, one of them the backing — cotton floss, a metal needle, and printed instructions. You supply scissors and an evening.
Can I still finish something before the 31st?
A bookmark, comfortably. The Death’s Head Hawkmoth, only if you start now.
Do I need a hoop?
No. At this size most people stitch in hand, and 16 count Aida holds its shape perfectly well without one.
One last thing. If you are not buying today, take something anyway: we have charted a small Halloween piece — a black cat arched over Happy Halloween lettering, a row of crooked houses, one pumpkin keeping watch — and it is yours for nothing. The PDF lands in your account once you have checked out at zero.
It is the chart and nothing else, which is the honest difference between it and everything above. A kit is all the rest — the Aida, both pieces of it, the floss wound and counted, the needle, the printed instructions. The hard part of a first project was never the chart.
Every kit in this article is designed and packed by our small family studio in Kyiv. Happy stitching — and happy Halloween.