So I thought I'd end the week on a crafty note, seeing the weekend is right upon us. You would think having stitched for so long (it's going on twenty plus years) I might have turned my hand to designing, messing around and creating my own patterns, but in, fact aside from stitching this blackstitch sampler, I never have. While I'm more then happy at adjusting colors and picking out my own threads, changing fabrics to backing and framing my own pieces, the thought of designing I felt was always beyond me.
But with stitching both the Mackinac and Forty Mile Point Michigan lighthouses, I thought there needed to be a bit of more English input. While it's pretty easy to find charts featuring American places, British ones are a little trickier. Over a couple of days I played around a lot of websites where you can upload your photographs and they'll chart out a cross stitch version you can stitch you can alter how many colours, the style, it's kind of addictive seeing all your photographs stitching. The result now being I have a couple of Yorkshire lighthouses all charted out and ready to roll.
Rather than throwing myself fully into the deep end I thought a test run with a much smaller and simpler pattern would be in order. So I came up with this little 3"ish Angel of the North design - it's pretty simplistic, but I like the result. It's certainly given me the confidence to mess around and design my own - working out a design around VW bugs will be how I'm spending this weekend!
Why the Angel of the North? Well heading back to Newcastle for the four years I lived there, seeing the Angel as we passed by on the train, I always knew my Geordie home was close, it always was my homing beacon.
Have you every designed anything crafty yourself?
Why the Angel of the North? Well heading back to Newcastle for the four years I lived there, seeing the Angel as we passed by on the train, I always knew my Geordie home was close, it always was my homing beacon.
Have you every designed anything crafty yourself?
Awwwwww, love the Angel :) This is really beautiful .. I wish I was good at crafty things!
ReplyDeleteThanks!
DeleteI love your wall! I would love to have one of little embroidered and cross stitched pictures all around. You did a beautiful job on the Angel of the North x
ReplyDeleteThank you - the wall is certainly coming together lately, even with all the topics being different (well most of them) they certainly blend well together!
DeleteI love it! I'm the same - have stitched plenty over the years but haven't really plucked up the courage to design a cross stitch design myself. I feel much more confident freestyling embroidery than I do cross stitch. What programmes are you using?
ReplyDeleteHave only seen the Angel of the North once on a trip to Newcastle for a weekend. Even though it was belting it down I still loved it.
I was using the stitchboard.com (I think) website where you basically just upload your photograph/image and you can adjust colours, how many colours you want and so on. It's pretty good, some of the colours can be a little off and I blocked some of the shades together but it's good enough for a base to work from! Plus it's free so you can't grumble too much as the rest tend to charge.
DeleteWhat a lovely wall! I think you should try and design more of your cross stitch!
ReplyDeleteThank you - it's certainly given me the confidence to design more that's for sure, now just need to find the time to design and stitch them haha!
DeleteWaw, your wall looks so lovely. When I was younger I loved stitching. It looks so pretty as decoration.
ReplyDeleteSofie x
Little green Sofie
The closest I've come to any sort of craft is some of the dioramas I've built for my action figures. It is starting to look like I may need to apply some of those skills to the trains I got. I really want to build the Ypsilanti depot.
ReplyDeleteAw, I miss the Angel! You did a great job!
ReplyDeletemmm what a lovely angel!!! I love crafting and when was in my last year of Uni stitching was my favourite occupation :)
ReplyDeleteI live in Washington so I pass this all the time and it's deifnitely a huge part of local culture :) It's a lovely pattern!
ReplyDeleteSimone | Thirty Something OAP