The Bedroom Cross Stitch Pattern

Description

The Bedroom cross stitch pattern was inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s renowned painting of his bedroom in Arles. I just love the incredible colour scheme and the three little paintings on the wall above the bed — can you spot the faint whisps of Van Gogh’s orange beard in his tiny self-portrait?

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This design is offered as a free sample so you can experience the full quality of my premium cross stitch patterns. It’s exactly the same as my paid charts — carefully colour-matched, professionally formatted, and compatible with Pattern Keeper.

Download it, explore the chart, and see how clear the symbols, thread lists, and layout are before you purchase other designs from my store.

The Project

This is a large, full-coverage cross stitch pattern that uses 104 different DMC colours. I strongly recommend using the Pattern Keeper App to manage your stitching and track your progress — it makes handling a project of this scale much easier.

Because Van Gogh painted The Bedroom as a completely flat scene — with no shadows or perspective — I flattened the image before charting. This means there’s very little confetti stitching, and many areas feature large blocks of single colour, making much easier to work on than you might expect.

You’ll still find a few tricky sections (particularly around the wall frames and bedding), but overall this design strikes a good balance between accuracy and ease of stitching.

The Painting

Van Gogh painted three versions of The Bedroom and my chart is based on the second in the series. Here is a little more about the painting (written by the Art Institute of Chicago), including Van Gogh’s own words:

Van Gogh conceived the first Bedroom in October 1888, a month after he moved into his “Yellow House” in Arles, France. This moment marked the first time the artist had a home of his own, and he had immediately and enthusiastically set about decorating, painting a suite of canvases to fill the walls. Completely exhausted from the effort, he spent two-and-a-half days in bed and was then inspired to create a painting of his bedroom.

As he wrote to his brother Theo, “It amused me enormously doing this bare interior. With a simplicity à la Seurat. In flat tints, but coarsely brushed in full impasto, the walls pale lilac, the floor in a broken and faded red, the chairs and the bed chrome yellow, the pillows and the sheet very pale lemon green, the bedspread blood-red, the dressing-table orange, the washbasin blue, the window green. I had wished to express utter repose with all these very different tones.”

Art Institute of Chicago

The Artist

If you love this cross stitch replica of La Chambre à Arles,  grab a coffee (or something sweeter) and browse my growing library of Van Gogh inspired projects. I’ve charted many of Van Gogh’s most famous artworks, maybe you’ll find your own favourite there.