Yesterday was the first day since Rhode Island announced that all schools would be closed next week, and that made it feel like the first day of vacation. (It was really more like the first day of quarantine, but we take our happy feelings wherever we can find them). I celebrated by working on something just for fun: designing a cross-stitch pattern for another “calamity” and test-stitching it. Here’s how it turned out.
The square of material that I stitched over is waste canvas. Without it, I could never have stitched such straight lines and even X’s.
I had wondered when I started this project if it was totally crazy and a waste of time, but seeing the three designs together makes me feel like I’m making good progress and that it’s going to look awesome when it’s done. I still have a lot of work to do. Toward that end, here are three things that I’ve learned so far and that I should keep in mind for future patterns:
- The size is determined by the smallest/thinnest element of the design. For the zombie poodle, it was the legs and neck. For the cat it was the tail and the eyes (each eye had to be one stitch in size, and there had to be stitches all the way around to set them off, which meant modifying the head shape slightly). For the pterodactyl, it was the beak and legs.
- Sometimes the orientation of the image needs to be adjusted. In order for the pterodactyl’s beak to look right, it had to be on a straight line. The original image wasn’t oriented that way, so I had to rotate it. It wasn’t a hard thing to do, but I wish I’d realized it sooner and saved myself the effort of re-gridding it. I reoriented it so that the beak was on a diagonal. My pterodactyl appears to be soaring, not swooping, which makes it less menacing than the original. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but it is worth noting.
- Those stitches hanging off the pterodactyl’s wings and head made sense when I was creating the design, but they didn’t look very good when they were stitched in. The zombie poodle has some hanging stitches, too, and I like them less now that I’ve focused on them. I might remove them from the design, and I will try to avoid them in future patterns.