How to adapt pictures to patterns without software

Carbon or transfer paper? I guess I must qualify as an old fart merely for knowing what these are and how to use them...

On Sun, 10 Jul 2005 17:09:21 GMT, Laury Walkey spewed forth :

Reply to the list as I do not publish an email address to USENET. This practice has cut my spam by more than 95%. Of course, I did have to abandon a perfectly good email account...

In rough terms you got a piece of graph paper with the right size of squares on it, and laid it over the picture. You identified the color in each square as a standard floss color, made a symbol for each, and wrote that symbol in the appropiate place of the pattern. HTH.

-- Jim Cripwell. From Canada. Land of the Key Bird. This creature of doom flies over the frozen tundra in winter, shrieking its dreaded call; "Key, Key, Key, Key rist but it's cold!!"

I once used the clear plastic sheets with the grid overlay for my pictures. I bought it at my LNS, but I see it's still on the net at:

You remember correctly. The ones I have are TransGraphX brand (there may be some spaces or hyphens in there). You laid them over your photo and then made a color photocopy.

Have you heard of Pixel Painting. It is done on a pc, or is that too new, I only found about it last week? I also resort to the old coloring pencils on a paper grid.

Hi Laury

I've done several in days of yore before computers and they all came out great. Much easier to stitch than computer generated charts also!

Before we learned of pixels during the computer age, how we looked at an image that we wanted to stitch was with the mindset of a paint by number picture. We would pick 7 to 24 colors that blended together well as our starting point for the color paint and/or floss selection. So that our finished pieces all blended together as wall hangings, we often used the same floss colors for almost all of our works.

To get more detail in our work, we began using the gridding method. We would take a piece of clear acitate the size of the photo and scribe lines on it that corresponded to our desired finished size and stitch count to scale.

Simply, if your photo was 3x4 inches and you wanted your finished piece to be 9x12 inches on 16 count, you would scribe your acitate to 64 lines per inch. Which naturally is not really feasible to do. So, off to the photo lab to have it enlarged to 9x12 or larger.

Back when we began doing this, most photo's were sepia, so we just chose the color blends we desired. But as color photo's posed a more natural image, to determine what floss colors to use, we would take a piece of lightly frosted acetate to lay over the scribed acitate so we could not see the multitude of colors underneath. The frosted acetate would blur the image so that you could only discern the predominant color of that grid square.

Since I did not have a fancy light table to do this on, I merely clipped the photo with the acitate grid attached to a white lamp shade. I used a couple of bobby pins to keep track of where I was, and just hold the frosted acitate up long enough to compare the strands of floss I had selected for my finished piece.

To do this, I would staple the full six strands of a 2 inch long piece of floss over the edge of a white cardboard and move it up and down over the grid square and pick the one that was closest.

When I was younger, I would use graph paper with 1/4 inch squares and copy the image by hand to the graph paper to enlarge it, also using an acetate grid, usually of 1/8 inch grid. I would do the outlines first and then go back and draw in the shades, so that the paper graph first looked like a coloring book, and then secondly like a paint by number. Then I would choose the colors.

There are advantages of doing the work by hand over using a computer, or using a simple computer graphics program like paint, where you can zoom in on the individual pixels.

The only thing you really have to remember is that in many cases, you are converting about 680 pixels per inch, down to only 14 or 16 pixels per inch. So you are going to lose a lot of detail.

When doing the work by hand, it allows you to add 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 stitches to get the outlines more sharp, and also to add backstitching on dominant outlines.

Today, almost all of my work is done using photo-charting, and I don't want the coloring book affect of backstitching. Depending upon the size of the piece and where certain focal points are, I may go back to the chart during touch up and change full stitches to 1/4, 1/2 or 3/4 stitches to more clearly define an outline of something special. But since most photo-charted work is not beautiful until you stand back from it a good way, I even skip the detail stitches and try to sample the image several times to pick up the most detail when it is charted.

Many top end computer graphics programs have options that can let you generate paint by number looking type images. More often than not, doing this step first, then placing the image in a photo-charting program, will produce a stitched image of the greatest detail with the least amount of confetti stitches.

Me, I must be a massochist because I don't mind all the confetti stitches. To me, that's what gives it the realizm my finished pieces do have. I usually work with 200 floss colors give or take. Knocking out colors that only have

Although the photo-charting programs are getting better as time goes on, many of them will use up all 200 colors during the first 1/4 of an image and then match those pallet colors to the remainder of the piece. This can cause great loss of detail in the lower end of the image, so I will often chart the image right side up and up side down to build two different color pallets, then I will often lock in the color pallet from the upside down scan and rerun the image scan right side up. This often brings out the detail areas both top and bottom with greater clarity. But then too it depends on the image itself as to where the greater detail of color would be desired. Most images have sky as the upper part of the image and the focal points are on the ground. So scanning the image right side up, causes the clouds to be very detailed and the ground images just averaged with the remainder of the colors available on the pallet.

Some of the newer photo-charting programs view the whole image at once, and slowly sharpen the image it sees as it builds it's color pallet to the number of colors you have selected to work with.

Although I could never afford it, for the real massochists out there, they even have a photo-charting program that uses blended floss to obtain otherwise unavailable colors. Stitching an image from such a chart would easily take

TTUL Gary