Block Finish Tutorial: Free Standing Cross Stitch Ornaments ⋆ Sirious Stitches

This is a cross stitch finish I’ve been wanting to try myself for ages, and I’ve quietly hoarded any useful styrofoam blocks I’ve received in shipments for years now. Well it’s about time I get around to it, so let’s try out a block finish together!

If you like the mushroom-themed stitches I’m making into cubes today, the patterns are also available on my Etsy!

If you prefer video tutorials, I have one over on YouTube!

This post may contain affiliate links. If you buy something using one of these links, I earn a small commission. However, there is no extra cost to you. Thanks for understanding! Learn more in my Disclosures & Privacy Policy.

What is a Block finish?

Okay I call it a Block finish, but I also see it often referred to as a Cube Finish or just a Styrofoam finish. But basically, you take styrofoam, and pin your cross stitch, some fabric, and some embellishments to it.
It doesn’t have to be a cube or even rectangular, You could cut them into all sorts of fun shapes.

Why a block finish?

Why might you want to do a block finish? There’s a few reasons you might want to do this over another finishing technique.

If you want your cross stitch to stand up on its own without need for a frame.
If you want a finish that is super lightweight.
If you want a finish you can easily UNDO if you want to change it up or finish it as something else later.
If you want a finish that doesn’t take much time and doesn’t require sewing.
You keep getting packages filled with Styrofoam and don’t want to throw it all out.

Materials For a Block Finish

First up, let’s talk about materials. What do you actually need to make one of these?

Base Materials

Styrofoam – You can buy styrofoam blocks or sheets at many craft stores. But I also recommend just saving them from shipments. These can be cut down to size with a serrated knife, or if you have sheets and want a thicker square you can glue or pin them together as well.

Satin Pins / Straight Pins – You can get Dritz straight pins at most sewing stores as well. But off brand ones work just as well and come in huge quantities. Sure the off brands are more likely to have bent pins or missing pin heads. But with the amount you get it usually works out to price if you plan to make a lot of these! But if you need another excuse to use up some pins, check out my Quilted Ornament tutorial as well.

Fabric Materials

Cross Stitch – Your finished stitch of course. But more importantly, you want to leave a decent amount of fabric around your stitch. It doesn’t have to be as much as I did, but you want at least enough to cover the front of your styrofoam and wrap over with at least another inch. So it can vary depending on how much space you want to give your design on the cube.

Backing Fabric – This could be a quilting cotton, or really any fabric you have on hand that you feel complements your design and doesn’t stretch. The exact quantity will vary based on your cube’s size, but we’ll talk about measurements here shortly. I got mine from a second hand craft shop, so I can’t link to this exact fabric, sorry.

Cotton Batting – This is optional. But if you don’t want the feel of styrofoam right under your cross stitch, many opt to do a layer of cotton batting on the front and back

Embellishments

While you can absolutely stop with just the above materials, it’s also fun to embellish your cubes with decorative elements.

Some suggestions include:

Ribbon – Size really depends on your cube. But typically anywhere from 1″, 1 1/2″, or even 2″.
Lace Trim – I found the pictured one at a second hand shop, but there’s plenty of lace trim to find online as well.
Braided Cording – If you want to hide the seam between the cross stitch and backing fabric.
Jewelry Box Feet – If you want the cubes slightly elevated, adding jewelry box feet is a fun way to make them just a bit *extra*
Beads – Either for adding some decorative bits to your ribbon, or can also be used as feet!

Measurements!

Let’s figure out how big a styrofoam block and how much backing fabric you need for this finish depending on your design.

Sizing Your Block Finish

The foam block should be just a bit bigger than your finished stitch area, to give it a little bit of breathing room. In this case, I have about a 1/4″ from the top and bottom of my piece, and a whole 1″ from the sides. Why so different? Because I wanted to use a block I had on hand from a package I’d received.

Just make sure there’s enough fabric to cover both the front of your cube, and about 1″ on each of the sides. Honestly you could even get away with a smaller amount on the sides if that’s all you have, but 1″ is a good amount to aim for.

My block was actually twice as wide as this, but I cut it in half so I could make two matching cubes out of it! It cut really easily with a serrated knife. You could also cut it into fun shapes at this point, if you wanted a specific shape to work with your design. But for my first time I’m sticking with a regular ol’ rectangle.

Sizing Your Cotton Batting

If you’d like cotton batting on the front of your cube, you’ll want to measure the height and width of your cube and cut two to that size. One for the front and one for the back.

Sizing Your Backing Fabric

Once you’ve gotten your cube cut to size it’s time to take a few measurements for your backing fabric.

First, the actual back. You’ll want it to go all the way around 3 sides of your cube and overlap where your cross stitch would end. This can vary depending on how much extra fabric your cross stitch had, but I simply measured right up to the edge of my cube and subtracted 2″ (1″ for each side), since I knew my stitch overlapped by well over an inch.

Take that same measurement in both height and width and cut out a your backing fabric accordingly. Make note of what part is the back vs the sides if you have a design you want centered on the back. Similarly, take note of which is your height if you have a directional fabric you don’t want to see ‘sideways’. It’s not always the wider side, if you have a tall cross stitch design.

Sizing Your Wrap Fabric

Finally, you’ll need a strip of fabric that wraps all the way around the ‘sides’ of your cube. So you’ll first want to measure the width of said cube. Mine is 3″. But we don’t want the raw fabric edges to show, so you’ll need to add at least 2″ to that as you’ll be folding over the sides. To make it easier, I’ve just doubled mine and cut a 6″ strip so I can just fold to the center rather than having to measure and make sure I’m staying even all the way across.

How long should your strip be? Long enough to wrap all the way around your cube and overlap by an inch or so. You’ll see in my photos later I even used the selvage edge as I knew it’d be hidden anyway.

Assembling Your Block Finish

Alright, you’ve got all your materials together. Let’s get started.

Pin Your Cross Stitch

Start by securing a piece of that batting to your cube if you’re using it. Some people glue this straight to the cube, I just pinned mine in the corners.

Once that’s secure, lay your cross stitch over the front of your cube and spend some time getting it centered. Measure from both sides to make sure it’s even from the edge of your cube.

Pin in the center of all four sides so it’s not sliding around while you work and so you can see and double check one more time that it’s centered. You can push the pins all the way in, I just left them sticking out so you could SEE them in the photo.

Folding Corners

The trickiest part of all this is making your corners look nice. But it’s really not as hard as it seems!

Basically, I turn the cube on its side and pull the bottom(or top) fabric in towards the side and pin it in place. You’ll have a weird loop going from where you pinned the side in the previous step.

Grab the edge of that loop and pull it towards your corner.

Then pin it in place as well.

Don’t forget I have a video of this finish as well if it’s easier to understand what’s happening here. But do that to all four corners, always folding to the side of your cube.

Add a few extra pins anywhere you feel the fabric is a bit loose. It doesn’t have to be pretty, as it’s all being covered up anyway.

Adding Your Backing Fabric

Now let’s do the same on the other side of the cube with your backing fabric. Starting by centering your cube on that square of fabric you took. Make sure if your fabric has a directional pattern that you’re noting which way is up!

As before, pin up the sides so you can flip it over and make sure it’s centered.

It doesn’t matter much with my fabric, as you can see. But if you’ve got stripes or a design that has a right side ‘up’, you’ll want to make sure it’s facing the right way and it’s straight.

Also make sure your fabric is overlapping the cross stitch on all four sides, and then proceed to fold the corners into the side just like you did before.

As you can see in my example, it doesn’t have to overlap by the same amount on all four sides.

Wrapping the Sides of Your Block Finish

Now that there’s pins everywhere and probably some uneven seams, let’s cover those up!

Folding Your Fabric Strip

We don’t want the raw edges of fabric showing, so in the measurements section we talked about adding some extra to the width of your cube. Now it’s time to take your long strip of fabric and fold in the sides. If you were low on fabric and had to use a smaller seam, fold in the edges by however much leeway you gave yourself, usually at least an inch.

Since I simply doubled my width, I will start by holding it in half and ironing that down so it makes a nice visible seam.

I then folded the fabric into that center seam, but overlapped it just as smidge so that my wrap would be slightly smaller than the width of my cube.

That way it doesn’t stick out but instead is snug up against the edge of your cube.

Iron those folds in place, and also iron out the fold you made earlier down the center.

Wrapping Around the Cube

Start by pinning your strop at the bottom of your cube. I pinned the selvage edge since I’ll be overlapping it and it won’t be visible.

Wrap it all the way around your cube. You can pin it in place around the sides if you feel you need to and are planning to cover it with a ribbon or something later, but it’s not necessary. If you pull it a little tight as you go it should hold itself in place just fine with just the bottom pinned.

Once you get back around, overlap the earlier edge and pin it in place. Except lining it up a little better than I did. That’s just like that so you can see that it’s overlapped in the photos! Probably…

And that’s it. You’re done. You did a block finish. Remember to take some non-blurry photos of it! (Unlike me, apparently.)

But what if you want to add a bit of pizzaz to it? Let’s keep talking.

Embellishing Your Block Finish

There’s all sorts of ways you can decorate your cube now. Since this is the first cube I’ve done I don’t have a bunch of finished ones to show you, so let’s do some mockups!

Adding Cording

One option is adding braided cord around the front to make a little bit of a frame. You can pin or sew it in place as you so wish.

This purple is a bit dark, but would definitely work with this snail. I’m making two matching cubes and the purple didn’t go with both, so I had to pass on this one unfortunately.

Using Lace Trim

Lace is a fun option as it lets the backing fabric shine through! Wasn’t quite the vibes I was going for though, so a pass on this one as well.

Wrapping With Ribbon

A common embellishment is to wrap a ribbon around it and tie a big ol’ bow at the top. This stripy sheer ribbon was super cute, but felt a bit too thin for this cube.

Making A Bow

I finally settled on this 1 1/2″ purple ribbon and did a kind of tiered bow. I forgot to take photos, but basically I pinned the ribbon at the bottom and did one whole wrap around just like with the fabric strip earlier.

Then I cut a smaller piece and made a little loop on top and pinned it in place in the center. Then an even smaller piece and pinned that loop on top of the other one. Finally a real short piece of ribbon that I turned into a circle and pinned in the center to hold all 4 layers in place. You can see in the video version of this post exactly how I measured them.

Adding Feet

Another fun thing to add to these cubes is feet! You can actually use large beads in this way by pinning them to the underside of your cube. But I went all out and used some little jewelry box feet to give them a bit of extra flair.

I used a couple of pins in each hole, stabbed in at opposite angles. Since the holes of these feet are designed for small screws and the pin wouldn’t hold it in place otherwise.

You can see this process a bit better in the video version of this tutorial if you need further instruction.

And there you have it! A quick and easy little finish for your cross stitches. Go forth and make use of all that non-recyclable packing material.