God, same hat with me and my bro. He acts so disinterested, and then suddenly we're watching Stranger Things at the same time in two different states
HMMMM. Spoiler: large I'm.... thinking about it. If I do, I'm looking at a pattern that's about 12.5''x16.5'', which mean one and a quarter inches of margin on the sides, and three quarters of an inch margin on the top and bottom. Which is only if the cloth is cut square, which... is usually not quite the case. This is actually the SMALL version of this pattern, believe it or not. The longer phrases in the smaller texts, those were originally done with the fonts for 'moon queen' and 'magic theater'. It was painful to get it this tight, and I can't even spare the room for borders, so I'm reprising the rewind message type lines that I used to divide the text in those patterns. At least if it works here, that's proof of concept for the rewind projects? And I'm guessing on colors as I go, so this is going to be a risky project on all sorts of exciting fronts :V
Hghhhhhh, okay, realtalk Spoiler Does that second green need to change? There are two other greens in this project, which I can't fit into this picture without extra work, but this looks a LOT different away from hotel lighting, and I can't tell if I'm overreacting. Part of me wants to say that top color should be moon queen, but that would mean picking out TWO lines and oh god no, plus moon queen is hecking huge, it doesn't need help popping. Goddammit, I couldn't have told this until it was against its neighboring colors, but it was a lot of work to GET it there, and I can't tell how much of my reaction is fleeting and how much this is Genuinely A Problem
u know what's the funny thing the funny thing is that I stitched three and a half letters in another color before deciding it was also No Good and picked those out too. I timed myself, and each letter is an average of 20 minutes to undo ;-; ALSO now I'm terrified to try more colors because I am thoroughly sick of that font and would like it to go away please. My options are 1) reusing the greens already in the project, as they are, 2) reusing the greens and blending them to make a gradient, and 3) dipping into the darker truer greens I originally set aside and hoping they blend well with the three finished lines :V And in cases 1 and 2, I also need to hope that the loki color at the end meshes, or reuse the 'traveler & wanderer' color even though it's less rich/dark that I could have gotten away with for such a large font The sad thing is that I didn't have much of a way to avoid this :/ I checked the colors out in person on the skeins and laying the skeins on the fabric, and did a test letter on each row before I got moving. It wasn't until the whole line started filling out that I decided I hated it. Even if I tracked down decent color codes for the greens (unlikely) and forced excel to use them and recolored the spreadsheet black, EVEN THEN the density and weight on the canvas is the driving factor, and i can't imitate that perfectly. I'm hopefully going to experiment with some satin-ish stitch with prospective colors (on the canvas, but that I can pull out easily) before I make any rash decisions, and I'm going to do these tests in the best light I can find, but man. I've usually got better instincts for color than this, I could almost be done with this sucker by now :/
Ah maaaan, that is puzzling. I've been staring at it asking deep questions about hue and saturation but I'm not really sure I trust my monitor or my brain with matters of color. Baffled noises of sympathy and encouragement. (The gray shadow of the moon qu looks kinda neat, even if the circumstances are maddening.)
It doesn't help that the color in the photos hasn't been very good compared to seeing the thing in real life. It gets close, but it's not quite there. The first green had to go because it was baby poop green and looked just fine on its own but was just... no. Not up against a pale minty green and a more saturated just-slightly-blueish green. Too much yellow and too much saturated, I think. The green from the unfinished M in the other color photo was better, and better enough that I did three letters of stitching before bailing, but it was still just enough yellow that I couldn't go through with it :PPP (and this is all hilariously frustrating, because with my skeins sitting on top of each other on the couch, they all look like they should work together. WHY.) The other greens I got in the first swoop through the store run darker than the ones I've already used, and tend to be more true green. I'm worried they'll look weird against the pale and/or blueish greens, but I think I won't be able to tell for sure until I do a color test. I've also got my supplies back, so I may have one or two extra greens that I didn't grab on this craft trip. If the 'traveler & wanderer' green has cousins, that would help. Or I could make the three colors in play work for the whole thing, buuuuuut it would almost definitely leave the blueish green for LOKI and it feels like I'd be doing a bad. Not really, but tell my brain that. It's so weird, he tilts towards olives when he isn't in true green, but the olives are NOT working (apocalyptic option: undo... everything. start over. i discarded my true greens originally because they seemed cartoony. but.... i'm kind of feeling it. oh my god @me, NO. (maybe)) I did go back and look at the pattern again to feel good about the end product, which did help. This is so large I can't get more than three lines at a time on the scroll unless I unwrap all my tension. I've been thinking about doing some square spirals in the bits around the edges to fill dead space and let me blend in additional shades of green, but... conflicted. Lots of conflicted. I did not plan this well, but I'm not sure what I would have done differently even if I'd known XDDDD
I think as far as I can see from the photo that seems right. Shift in hue with the yellow plus shift to greater saturation at the same time. It seems like it should still be fine in this collection of variations on green but well. Why are colors.
FINALLY. Spoiler I'm so tired. I picked out MOON QU, MOO, MA, KI, and I, plus a stray O and a T because by the end my brain was so fried I lost the ability to count. I had to make two single-skein trips to the fabric store. I think the colors I ultimately settled on were 3347/986/987/895/3346/986. I took notes, but I gave up partway through :V Also sparkly floss is the literal devil and I already knew better but I used it anyways. I surrendered it to the framers and won't have to see it again until it's safely behind glass and no longer my problem. But I have a giant flashy genderfluid Loki creation to nail right the fuck to my wall, so this was all totally worth it and I'll be more aware of that once I'm caught up on missed sleep and hobby time :V
Okay, this feels like cheating because cross-stitch was the only thing I didn't manage to work in DIRECTLY, but there's a work-based craft group that meets sometimes at lunch to do handcrafts... theoretically. It was dead, another new hire resurrected it, for a week there were other people, and then I've been doing a lot of cross-stitching alone at lunch since then :V BUT idgaf, I have lots of practice at being weird on my own and have a knack for translating being weird on my own into social connections, and also like four other people have expressed interest as well, and I'm going to resurrect this craft group or die trying and now i have FLIERS Spoiler: large That's a lie, I don't quite have fliers, I just have this extremely clever and eye-catching image that I will attach timing/location information to and post up around my workplace for people to see. Also I will remove my online handle before this goes anywhere near a public location. But I'm stoked! This idea was nagging at me and I had no idea if it would work, but I'm really pleased with how it translated.
The Posterize tool in GIMP does seem to help a little with simplifying the number of colors in the picture! The trouble is getting pic2pat to stop turning some of the background grey when it's clearly mauve in certain sections :P
If you can select the background (roughly) and increase saturation, that might help with the issue! Honestly, filtering the whole image more saturated probably wouldn't hurt much at all, and pic2pat can tend to run grey in general
I'm already upping the contrast and saturation because I'm a heavy contrast monster :') The things we do for Starscream...
I think... I'm going to try to do the full eight-piece set of cdrw patterns for jro For a convention I'm not even 100% positive I can make yet ;u; I ordered a shit-ton of 18-count Aida fabric, because I'm 99% sure the patterns won't fit on the standard size of 14-count fabric. And I ordered it in all black because i am NOT to be trusted with that much uncovered white fabric, especially as a present, god. But that meant that it was expensive as far as ground costs. It's... not all that bad, it was about twice the cost of a standard roll of 14-count from the fabric store, but it's an uncommon size and an uncommon color. Hell if I know why black is uncommon, white fabric is the literal devil. God, this is a horrible idea. I'm still going to do it, but it's a horrible idea. It means the odds of me ever making these for myself are... low. But the odds of following through on them for ANY reason were never good, I knew that when I was making them. And I'm not going to have another loki situation on my hands, this is going to be EASY easy easy on the colors. Which..... may run into it being so straightforward it's boring, but I have no good way to win XDDDD If I go with cdrw colors.... Hard black and hard white are out. If I reference Chromedome, I can get a reasonable selection of plausible oranges and yellows, but Rewind is the one talking, and the only significant color left in his palette is red. His visor is blue, but it's... not a color that makes you think about Rewind. I don't want to look edgy or anything, and black-and-red is a sorta aggressive color scheme. I'd want to go pale and desaturated for a softer look and for getting the most of my contrast. I don't want to have the text and dividers in the same colors, I think. I need the text to pop some, but not too-too much. If I get reds from the same color family, that might work, but that's going to limit my selection a little further. I could always go for a dark orange, but that means I'm gambling on what colors look good together on the canvas again, no matter what irl says :/ I'd toyed with the idea of doing a full rainbow+1, but it's too hazardous. I'm also in a dangerous spot re: 'I'M IMPOSING!!!!!!' because this is a lot of wall space to commit to, and a lot of framing $$$$ to commit to, and I'm inflicting it on a person without their foreknowledge. But if I went with a fully painted type of picture, i d even k what picture I'd use. I've struggled to find decent options for me in mtmte. The best candidates are rehashing the megatron dotl picture or the tarn+fulcrum picture, but I've already DONE those. There's the picture of tarn in the rain, but I'll lose most of the rain in translation, and I'm not confident enough to stitch raindrops over the base as an experiment, not for a present. If I go digging in the alternate covers, I might find something workable (that's where the megatron one came from), but it's not exactly easy to do that. And... given that jro wrote the series, the cdrw patterns are a direct reference to his writing, and one of the most powerful moments in the series. It's really fitting, but I'm already an anxious mess about it XDDDDDD I committed to a shit-ton of fabric costs, so I'm running with this unless there's a disaster in the execution. I think I'm running with this. I'm still second-guessing everything, but I have to wait for the fabric to ship still. AUGHHHHHHH you'd think I learned my lesson with herz and larry but NOOOOO LET'S BRIBE THE BIG IMPORTANT CREATOR INTO KNOWING WHO YOU ARE, WHAT COULD GO WRONG. AND LET'S DO IT x8 ;u;
It sounds super cool and I bet he'll absolutely love it. What about doing the letters in desaturated soft grays and the divider spaces in different pale reds? kinda referencing rewind's design in a way
Spoiler The good news: It works! It looks awesome!!! The less good news: I managed to flip the direction of my crosses for the first time in YEARS, and the outer border goes in the opposite direction from the rest, stop I need to keep that consistent across patterns The borders take foreverrrr, and this is the smallest one Finding the right background entertainment for max efficiency is surprisingly hard I need to do these at a rate of 1/week, at a bare minimum I need to also make the OP toy, the anaglyph pokemon, and the forced perspective tunnel for showing off at work on the 23rd Okay, so let's aim to finish this one tomorrow. I'll try lpotl or mfm for zero-visuals simulation. If I finish, I either start pokemon or optimus. If I need to give my hands a break, tunnel pattern.
