Just backstitch to do!
I make things -- books, knitted items, crocheted angels, and anything else I can find to make. Here I will write about my adventures in creating.
Showing posts with label cross-stitch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cross-stitch. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Thursday, September 5, 2013
Christmas!
I don't know how all these people churn out cross stitch projects so quickly. Think I can get a half dozen of these by Christmas?
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Thursday, February 21, 2013
A question about embroidery patterns
I'm confused about cross stitch and embroidery patterns people sell online. As far as I can tell, someone puts up a lovely, high-res image (well, line drawing) on Etsy, looking perhaps like this cheerful clock from Shutterstock, and you're on your honor to pay them to send you a digital copy of the image rather than just printing out the image from their shop yourself for free. Is it really all on the honor system? (Kits I understand. I buy kits. But digital image files?)
Cross stitch is similar - it's a bit harder to back-form a chart and pick out your own thread colors, but (especially with one-color designs) it's still basically "here's a grid with the squares in the picture filled in with red thread - you can see it easily in the photo, but please pay me to send it to you rather than just doing it yourself." Indeed, for out-of-print kits, it's fairly common to find an old photo online and work it out yourself, since you can't get the kit anymore (the old small pictures of English Heritage sites are good examples here). So is buying the digital pattern just done because it's the right thing to do and you want to support the artist? (Not that there's anything wrong with that.). Or is there something I'm missing?
(Embroidery patterns count as art for copyright purposes, I believe; so would a cross-stitch image, most likely. Knitting does not - I mean, the words of the pattern are copyright as written material, but the technique is not copyrightable and the finished object would likely be a useful good rather than art, legally speaking. That's why you're not going to have much luck suing someone who looked at a photo of your baby sweater and worked out the pattern on their own. It's also a lot more work to do that than to right-click and download a photo instead of paying someone to email it to you. Just like with quilt patterns, generally a combination of public domain patterns (if they're even copyrightable in the first place), but you pay for them to keep from having to work out all the math yourself.)
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Cross-stitch Ganesha/Puliyar - and lessons learned
The husband's parents moved to Texas from India in the 1960s-1970s. They are Hindu, and in fact were instrumental in founding the main Hindu temple in Pearland (south of Houston). When we were living in El Paso, I had a lot more spare time, and so I decided to make something for them.
Through the magic of the internet, I found a clip-art Ganesha (known to his family - South Indians - as Puliyar) and converted it to a cross-stitch pattern through some free-trial program. It was a lovely pattern, very clear, with specific DMC/Anchor threads listed, and so I set to work.
Lessons I learned:
1) it's self-torture to work on black cloth, as you can't see the holes.
2) if a pattern calls for 42 inches of floss, and you're using 2 strands together, you really only need 14 inches of six-strand floss. Yes, I bought enough floss for three projects.
3) there's a reason pattern designers get paid for their work, and it's not just putting clip art through pattern-creating programs. My pattern had 21 colors, and one showed up for just 2 stitches, and a few others would have one stitch every four inches or so. It's all gradations of blue/green/gray, so a human rather than a computer creating it would have made it much more stitching-friendly. (I did take over the 2-stitch color with another color.)
4) a large project on black cloth with 21 colors unintelligently designed will take longer than the 4 months until Christmas I promised myself. In fact, it will take around 2 years (conveniently, until the mother-in-law's 60th birthday party... which, to be a more effective surprise party, was thrown at a time of year nowhere near her birthday).
But they loved it, and the husband's dear grandmother takes such pride in showing it off to her friends, and they've installed it in a prominent position in their home, so I feel it was all worth it.
(sorry for the bad photo, it's reflective and this was taken during a party - that's me in pink in the reflection.)
Not worth it enough to do it again, though, even if I do have enough thread to make three.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)