The reason we’ve decided to limit the maximum pattern size our app creates to a maximum of 1,000 stitches in size and 255 colors is not because it wouldn’t be trivially easy to make both much higher - but rather because we feel it would be misleading and unethical to sell people patterns that we don’t believe they could complete. Within minutes, we can load a photo and try out different resolutions and thread counts to get something that looks good and can be completed in a reasonable time. Maybe if we went back in time 20-30 years and wanted to create a photo-realistic pattern it might have taken someone many hours of painstaking effort to map the colors in an images to become stitches in a pattern (and why cross-stitch designs used to be much simpler and flatter than they are today) … but nowadays a computer can do that for us in milliseconds and do it better than a human ever could. I’ve seen some people state it takes them tens of hours or even multiple weeks working on a chart design and it involves lots of pre-processing to prepare the images in advance. What is much harder is making a chart that looks good even when the resolution has been reduced and the number of colors have been limited - down to a size that makes it achievable.īut what does “much harder” mean? How Long Should It Take? It’s not really an “achievement” to create a huge chart with lots of colors - of course it’s going to look good - the closer you get to the original image, the better it will appear but also as we’ve seen, the more impossible it will be to complete. But our eyes and brains fill in and see the detail and it will still look amazing and impressive.Ī great pattern is one that will look good and can be completed. If we want a photo on the wall, just get a photo printed - it will look great.Ĭross-stitching is more “art” like creating a painting - a simplified version of a scene with the illusion of detail that isn’t really there. You’d be trying to stitch on the equivalent of a huge roll of carpet if you could even buy material that large or you would have alot of extra work trying to sew panels together. We’re also ignoring the fact that even at a fine 25 stitch-count fabric, that would be a 256” x 192” or 21.5ft x 16ft monster - how big is your wall? Because that would be too large for anything smaller than a large castle! We’re talking Bayeux tapestry scale. Better get those grandkids trained up and hope you still like the picture!
Suppose you manage to stitch 500 stitches each and every day without a break that would take 61,440 days or 168 years. Yes, thats thirty million stitches, and we’re talking complex stitches - a photo typically won’t have lots of solid blocks of single colors that are easy to stitch - it will have lots of confetti to slow you down. Make no mistake - they’ll all need to work on it too if it’s ever to be finished:Ī photo that is 6,400 x 4,800 pixels would be 30,720,000 stitches. As I explained in an earlier article about dithering images and how image information is discarded it’s easy to create an amazing looking pattern - just take the photo from any modern high-end multi-mega-pixel camera and make each pixel a stitch, use as many colors as DMC make threads for and boom, you have THE most amazing pattern ever that will look incredible if you, your children, their children and your descendants ever mange to complete it. The truth is that creating a good cross-stitch design is about compromise. Some people would have you believe that a “great” pattern means big. What makes a great chart? For me it’s two things: something that’s going to look great when it’s been completed … but also, something that can actually be completed - in a lifetime!. So, I’m going to explain some truths about the process to creating great cross-stitch charts and why we need to begin with a clear definition of what “great” really means. I know this article might even be a little controversial* but we’ve seen a lot of misleading comments about the process of designing cross-stitch charts and at the same time, there also seems to be a lot of curiosity about the process but not a whole lot of information available to explain it.Īt one time, we were a little “in awe” of the charts that people produced and figured there must be some amazing secret process to it all but after working on a cross-stitch pattern making tool which required learning a lot more detail about the process, I feel like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz … finally seeing the Wizard behind the curtain who’s busy trying to pretend there is more to it all. Ok, the headline maybe a little overhyped - I’ll tell you right now that there’s no alien technology involved (sorry).
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