I thought I would tell you a little story of what has just happened with me here in Ottawa, Canada. Apparently a lady has a picture of great sentimental value consisting of a poem and an original drawing of a family pet done by a member of the family. She is an avid cross stitcher, and wanted to turn this image into a counted cross stitch pattern. She tried, unsuccessfully, to find any place to get this done, and made enquiries at our LNS, Cross Stitch Cupboard. A lady from our Guild, who works there, suggested she spoke to me. She rang me up, and we had quite a long conversation. I first told her the only sensible way to do the poem was to find a ccs alphabet, and hand draw out the poem. She immediately realized this was the way to go. But then we came to the picture. I sort of got the impression she had the same idea that I had some 25 years ago; you send a picture to someone, who knew by instinct precisely what sort of a pattern you wanted, and who could wave a magic wand and such a pattern would appear. Life is not like that. I was sure I had not got the message across, so suggested she send me a copy of the picture. I only have a 50K modem, so I made sure the image was in *.jpg format. This format gets a huge compression ratio by throwing away unwanted information. Sure enough, I got the image; something over 1000 pixels square, and totally unsuitable for me to turn into a pattern. I wrote back some fairly detailed instructions, starting by explaining that I could only turn a picture into a pattern at one pixel per stitch. I could not do any thinking. She needed to decide precisely how many stitches per inch she was going to use, and precisely how big the picture needed to be. Then she could calculate how big the picture would be in stitches. After that she must reduce the picture in her computer to that number of pixels, look at it, and decide if it had lost so much detail it would not be worthwhile stitching. I got a reply saying she would think about it. I explained she should send me the image as a *.tif or *.gif. These formats have a far lower compression ratio that *.jpg, but do not throw away any information. They are, therefore, right for small images. Some 24 hours later I got a lovely little picture, 112 pixels wide in sepia tones; wonderful for conversion, with only a few colors required. She said she had looked at the picture, and it was what she expected a ccs picture to look like; somewhat fuzzy but quite recognizable. In considerably less than 5 minutes, and pattern was on its way back, in *.pat format; with instructions as to how to download the Pattern Maker Viewer to print the pattern out. There is now one very happy lady in Ottawa who has the sort of pattern she was looking for. The point of this is that, if anyone follows a very simple set of steps, any picture can be turned into a computer-generated counted cross stitch pattern, in a virtually costless way. Whether such a pattern is worthwhile spending the money on for materials, and the time on to do the stitching, with oodles of confetti stitches, is something only the stitcher can decide.
- posted
19 years ago