Cool! I really like the idea of him having removable stuffing, that's very handy. Edit: is the back ridge shaped like a handle? (E.g. with a gap you can wrap your hand around for ease of grip, or similar.)
This is the year i overcome my fear of mittens/socks! I just finished my first pair of simple shmimple mittens! hufflepuff colors for a friend! she loved them :D
k so the project i mentioned WAY BACK WHEN is finally ALMOST DONE. i have washed it and it is hanging to dry before I iron, scan, and frame it. next project is this baby: which i've had translated over in the Latin thread. (thanks @OnnaStik & @albedo!!) i'm going to add some illuminate-y things (not illuminati, very different) on the sides and bottom of it to make it look a bit like a tapestry. whole thing will be about 11x17 when it's done.
I.... have started.... a project.... for.... fun? ??? anyways this is what im doing, it is smol, and cute, and i saw it while playing alpha sapphire and just thought 'I want to crossstitch that' so i am
Not sure if this is on topic, but does anyone have any recs for knitting/crafting blogs? I used to read the Yarn Harlot blog, but... tbh I felt like it fell off a lot when the blogger started writing books as her full-time job. There is something really soothing about watching other people knit and make things and talk about their fairly cheerful daily lives. #continues to be metasperg
So I was brilliant and gave away the presents for my coworkers without taking pictures of them xD Whoops. Maybe I'll ask them to take pictures for me so I can post them. But they were really happy and touched so I'm glad I did it!! I was gonna try to contact the school and be like 'yo can I sell these' but after doing it four times, I am so DONE with seeing that little dog's face. =P
after approximately three hours of futzing with the pattern: (paging @albedo and @OnnaStik again to see their text all fancylike) i'm doing it on 28-count so it's not actually fucking huge. the fabric is in the mail. i'm currently working on making the palette../
double-posting because eh final pattern: 34 colours, approximate size 14.5" x 12", gonna use gold thread for at least some of the yellow (definitely in the big C) to actually illuminate it because I'm a nerd. @spockandawe, i don't know how you do stuff like your TF ones, these are bloody well hard enough... oh! and!
Most of the transformers ones, I cheat and shove it though pic2pat, which spits out the chart and the palette for me :P That's my standard solution. The downside is that anything with crisp lines is gonna get blurred, so images need either good color blocking or like, a painterly feel to them. One or two projects where I needed those crisp lines, like the whirl ones, or the horribly-lit cygate WIP I'm going to attach below, I cheated differently, haha. I blew up the images really big, fiddled with excel until I had pretty square cells, set the image as a background, and got to tracing. I make up my own code as I go, eyeballing the colors from the picture and picking my own letters to fill in the chart. It's pretty time-consuming, and it's easy for things to get BIG. I was supposed to do this as a quick craft trade for curlicuecal, and she sent me her half of the trade... a month ago....... and I'm still only about half done with this project and have hideous amounts of white-on-white stitching to go. The WORST part of this method is matching up your palette later. DMC puts up swatches, but it still ends up spread across eight tabs, and it can be hard to really see how saturated things are, so I usually end up having to tweak things later. Whirl worked out surprisingly well, but even though I agonized over the colors for ages online and got the best blues I could for this, the only one that's really a great match for the original is the lineart navy blue. I've had the best luck making my chart, saving the image with my colored backgrounds and code letters, taking it on my phone to the store, and agonizing over the colors in person. I keep a running document with letter codes and DMC floss numbers, plus potential backup numbers if I'm not sure. The palette matching can get painful. I've thought about running the image through pic2pat just to steal pieces of the palette they spit out, but I haven't actually had a chance to give that method a try yet.
@Kaylotta Goddamn, that's gorgeous. I am so excited to see how it comes out. :D I'm back to work on @TwoBrokenMirrors' Gryffindor scarf, which is itty bitty right now, but coming along!
I felt shockingly motivated to knit while at the laundromat. I did like five times more work on my hardest project than I usually do in one sitting.
@spockandawe tracing in Excel. I never would have thought of that - that's brilliant. I've been running my pics through Stitchboard repeatedly, poking at the setting until I get something I like, then tweaking the actual pattern later (in the vein of "no, you don't actually need one bloody stitch of brown here, fuck you").
wrt making cross stitching patterns: I use ms paint tbh. XD I zoom in as far as I can, then put gridlines on and use that. If the picture is too big to do a 1 to 1 pixel to stitch ratio, I try a 4 to 1 ratio or 16 to one. I fiddle til I can get it right and I also end up with a shit ton of 3/4 stitches. Which is The Worst but also makes it look better tbh. I don't actually recommend this if pic2pat works though, because it's a pain and takes hours. xD (It's kinda soothing though and I've gotten good results...) Oh I also backstitch like crazy to make everything pop.
More stitched robots! This project was... bigger than it sounded, from the base dimensions. Even though I should know better. And the amount of color blocking was pretty brutal, so it was more of a slog than a lot of the stupidly detailed painted-looking projects have been, so I'm definitely going to be more careful about size. I've got three more projects planned (and materials to start two of them), as soon as I get feeling back in my fingers :P
My current "big project" is taking forever, largely because I didn't look before I leapt and promised @Anomal(eee) the Wings of Peace shawl as an anniversary present. This, as it turns out, was several levels above my head, but not so far that I haven't mostly been able to cram-learn new lace technique as I go. Also, of course, she decided she wanted a dark-colored yarn. <3 (It's appropriate, since everything about my wife is Challenge Mode). But I'm finally past the top/more complicated lace part - now just for the long feathers! Spoiler: not too bad so far
And then, of course, I crosspost my update picture to my facebook, and have this conversation with my wife in the comments:
I started a bunch more projects, because another cousin is having a baby - a cousin I'm related to by blood! who I actually speak to! So I've made a sweater and a pair of pants so far, and now I'm doing another sweater, and I'm gonna do a blanket and a hat and socks and and and . . . I am excite.
