Here’s a neat site I recently stumbled across. Urban Threads peddles edgy designs for machine- and hand embroidery, and also offers their designs as high-resolution clip art.

Their site features a project gallery and blog and, best of all, they frequently offer free designs for download. For January they celebrated Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday with an adorable “Nevermore” design (now back in their shop, but you can also see a finished version at craftershock), and their current free logo patterns could easily be repurposed as a personalized skull-and-needle-crossbones design.

Their downloadable patterns are very cheap–about $3 each–and wonderfully whimsical. Many are cute without being saccharine (I’ve already bought their Abducted pattern to stitch on a shirt for Shadowboy), and there are several design “collections” like tattoos and robots that would look great on a set of tea towels or throw pillows.