Friday 25 April 2014

CROSS STITCHING: Angel of the North

Embroidery

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!

Angel Embroidery

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? 

13 comments:

  1. Awwwwww, love the Angel :) This is really beautiful .. I wish I was good at crafty things!

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  2. I 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

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    1. Thank you - the wall is certainly coming together lately, even with all the topics being different (well most of them) they certainly blend well together!

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  3. I 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?

    Have 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.

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    1. 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.

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  4. What a lovely wall! I think you should try and design more of your cross stitch!

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    1. Thank 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!

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  5. Waw, your wall looks so lovely. When I was younger I loved stitching. It looks so pretty as decoration.

    Sofie x
    Little green Sofie

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  6. 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.

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  7. Aw, I miss the Angel! You did a great job!

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  8. mmm what a lovely angel!!! I love crafting and when was in my last year of Uni stitching was my favourite occupation :)

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  9. I 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!
    Simone | Thirty Something OAP

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