Hello and Welcome! I’m John Wigham, and together with my colleagues Janis Applegate and Scarlet Smith, are the people behind this website. I first stumbled across Cross Stitch some 15 years ago when my mother-in-law came to live with us. 

That first time I saw her stitching, I thought she was sewing but then looking closer realized it was something very different … she was creating a picture, which, when you stood back a little, looked remarkably lifelike!

Coincidentally, I’d recently read an article by Internet Marketer John Reese, who predicted that cross stitch was largely unrepresented online and was likely to explode into life sometime soon. Happily, he was absolutely right. Cross stitch has become outstandingly popular and we believe will continue to be so. 

By this point, curiosity had definitely got the better of me and before I knew it I was “having a go” – not very well, I must add. In fact my stitching efforts over the years have rarely been above moderate; a degree of numbness in the fingers of my right hand the probable reason, courtesy of a farm accident in my childhood (well, that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it;~). My interest in cross stitch has remained strong throughout, despite my lack of skill.

At that time (2004), I was building and flipping (selling) websites so it seemed natural to build a cross stitch website. Mother-in-law was all for it so we worked together slowly building a site. 

We thought we’d specialize in cross stitch patterns and chose the name patternsgalore but found there was already a knitting website with that name. So after much debate, my wife came up with the idea of patternspatch, which we successfully registered; and so our cross stitch site was born. Here’s our first ever website header: