Designing your own pattern...

A couple of years ago, I found a picture in the newspaper and wanted to do it in needlepoint. My daughter blew it up on the computer, divided it into

4 and printed each quarter out on paper. I taped them together, taped them to my island in the kitchen(lol) and laid a piece of graph paper over it, taped down too, and laboreously(?) traced it onto the graph paper. The upshot is that I ended up with a very pleasing needlepoint picture, now hanging over our bed. Since I don't know what style of needlework you wish to use, this may not be helpful. The actual needlepoint was done fairly free hand, just following the general colors as on the original picture. PS---Thanks for the suggestion as to deleting postings. Clarice in AZ >

Hi Clarice,

I plan on doing a mix of cross-stitch and blackwork.

Any drawbacks to how you did your project?

I'm the type that thinks and thinks and plans and plans some more and once I have it all set in my mind I just go off and do it. But until then, I will worry it over in my mind for awhile. :-)

Thanks!

Tara

scottnh wrote:

Tara i would advice you to first put ANY thought , you have about youyr design on paper ,,,, What you want to design , Why ? colors ? background reading or meanings ,,,,, ANYTHING ... than let it rest a bit and do something else,,,, after a day or two , or a week , reread all your thoughts and see if it still relevant , now start working , making sketches collecting materials etc,,, making swatches etc..... good working . mirjam

Tara of Camden said

I don't design from scratch. Instead, I take something someone else has done and modify the heck out of it in real time. In other words, I don't plan in advance. This course of action can be somewhat of a curse as the colors, threads and stitches for my free style embroidery quite often don't look right after they're in place.

Hi Tara

I've pretty much done most of my own designs, including photo charting before we had computers.

I'm a terrible artist when it comes to drawing, so more often than not I would scan through magazines for the size and shape of an object I wanted to use and cut out those items and make like a collage of pieces on pasteboard. Once that was done, I would trace all the lines I wanted to use on my piece from that decopage. The colors of the pieces I cut out to use were unimportant as I would later work up my own color scheme so that the whole piece came together.

Now that we have computers and digital cameras, I can go out and photograph the individual objects and size them to the size I need for the project I'm working on and then fit them into the scene I'm trying to build up. I normally still do this by printing out the pages and pasting them to pasteboard like I always did. They never seem to come out just right when I do it only on the computer. However, when I finally get it just about the way I want it, I might then scan it and place it in the computer in order to apply the color scheme.

But it still takes experimentation with various flosses and special materials to get that 'just right' look you are after.

Before we had photo charting programs, when I wanted to do images, I would experiment with programs like paint in the zoom out mode to get only pixels. Some of the early painting programs you could set the number of pixels per inch which gave me like a chart in color to build my symbol color chart from.

I normally do not have backstitching on any of my pieces. To me this makes them look like cartoonish coloring books. But I may use different types of stitches to get a particular affect that I desire. For example, a small grassy area is usually done in a vertical stitch only on some pieces.

I worked a piece that included part of a pier once and the ropes between the pillars were stitched using a diagonal cable stitch to make the ropes appear real.

And as you already know, I often mix clear or tinted monofilament with my floss in areas that have for example window panes or where I want it to appear there is a reflection, like water surfaces, etc.

My wife Debi will often build up stitching by several layers to achieve an affect. Like a large tree trunk for example. It might be only one layer thick around the perimeter, and possibly up to six layers thick by the time she reaches the center of the tree trunk.

She has done several of those purchased patterns that always have a quilt displayed, sometimes on a rocker, etc. The last one she did had a house in the background with shutters and a railing and a rocker by a tree in the front yard showing a quilt.

She built up the tree to very thick, and also did the railing and shutters two or three layers deep to add dimension to her work.

Right now she is working on a piece using some techniques I have never seen before. She doesn't know yet if it will come out as expected, but she is putting a whole lot of work into it. She is working with three separate pieces of Aida, the front piece is cut out in many large places so that only the foreground items will be stitched on that piece of material. Behind that will be the second piece of Aida that contains most of the work, but with a few cut out areas. The back piece will be stitched with the off in the distance components of the scene. When each piece is completed, she will assemble them about 3/8 of an inch apart, one right behind the other. But right now she doesn't yet know if she wants to leave the cut out areas as holes or fold them such that they can be stitched to the piece behind it to hide the fact that there are different layers of backing material. She keeps experimenting with several smaller pieces to see what affect each of her ideas will produce.

I think she picked up the 'ya just gotta be different' from me!

TTUL Gary

Tara of Camden wrote: