Wednesday, February 12, 2014

The evolution of a self-created cross stitch pattern...



So I've been working on a gift for a dear friend. It's a cross stitch project, a sampler of sorts. But I had to create the pattern myself. I've done them before, and usually they're birth samplers and are much easier to throw together. You have pattern books with alphabets and decorative lines and borders and cute little baby patterns. Dig out the graph paper and the pencils and plan it out. Or, you know, you could buy a kit, but where's the fun in that?? But I digress...

I'd seen this tee shirt...

...and an idea sparked!

(Those are names of spells from the Harry Potter universe, if you couldn't tell.
My friend and I share a love of the Harry Potter books/movies.)

I wanted to cross stitch it, but try as I might I couldn't find that Harry Potter "font" in a cross stitch pattern. And it would have taken quite some time to create my own and in the various sizes. Honestly, I couldn't have pulled it off. So I did the next best thing--I dug out my cross stitch alphabet books and looked for alphabet styles in various sizes that looked Harry Potterish.

As a side note, in cross stitch they aren't really called fonts, but the term works for my post so I may interchange the term with alphabets as seems appropriate.

Anyway, once I picked out alphabets in fonts I liked, then I had to create the words from the tee shirt to see how they scaled and mixed and matched. Different fonts are going to end up different sizes. Once I did that and counted the sizes of the words, I had to arrange them on my master pattern. I started with the arrangement found on the tee shirt, but had to move things around to make them fit and look appealing. I ended up looking up a few spells that weren't on the tee to switch out or add into available spaces.

My work product...
 This is determining word-to-font size.

This is the master pattern, though it's hard to see...

Then it was time to stitch. And stitch and stitch and stitch. Because most of the alphabets are outline and require only back-stitching, they went rather quickly, but I took a huge break over the holidays and got back to it almost too late! In fact, I didn't finish by her birthday, which was last Thursday, but I'm going to see her this Saturday and come hell or high water, this thing will be done.
This is what it looks like at the moment...


There's a lot of aida cloth left at the top and the bottom--that's so I can roll it and make the whole thing look like a roll of parchment. However, I need some some sort of fray stopper so I can cut the sides a bit wavy and not have the whole thing shred apart from the sides over time. I'll have finished product pictures next week.
Have you ever received a hand-made gift (aside from your children, if you have them)?

Care to share what it was and the event for which it was given?

2 comments:

Regina Richards said...

I received a handmade gift yesterday. My husband make a stand in the woodshop group he belongs to so that my computer screen is raised to a better eye level for me. Before I had my monitor sitting on a thick thesaurus, but it still wasn't high enough. This not only looks beautiful and brings the screen up to the perfect height, it also has storage underneath so I don't lose any desk space. I love it!

Jen FitzGerald said...

YAY for hubby. Sounds like a fabulous gift, Regina. I know it'll make you that much more productive.