Marion from the UK recently wrote to tell me about her introduction to designing cross stitch. Here is her story:
"My interest in designing is purely on a personal basis. Two years ago I was asked to design and stitch a cross-stitch picture for our SWRI project. Although I have cross-stitched for years, I had never attempted anything like this!
I bought Jane Greenoff's Designer Gold CD-Rom and took it from there. Obviously, I felt under a great deal of pressure but with the support of my friends and a lot of suggestions from them, which I would have loved to have done, we eventually decided to convert photographs of the various monuments in the Village.
Three of us are quite experienced stitchers, one of whom is 98 years old and her stitching is amazing, the other three are novices but between us we produced the attached picture. At the time, I vowed I would never contemplate any designing ever again! But time has passed and every time I see it displayed in our Village Hall, I think I didn't do too badly, but how would I have got on if I had known more about designing.
My friends were not too keen on using a lot of threads. While I did realise that the more threads, the better depth, I kept to more of less 18 to 20 colours,.Except for the one of the Kirk which I stitched myself, with 47 colours. This paid off and it has been greatly admired.
I had had a talk with a local graphic designer who explained to me about the number of pixels in the camera resulting in many more colours than I could see.but I just didn't know how to adjust them successfully, so I left well alone. I appreciate your tip about not choosing adjoining colours and know exactly what you mean about stitching with colours next door to each other! But I had never thought of that. Thanks so much.
Don't know if I will ever have enough confidence to design my own, but I would contemplate a conversion from photographs, if I learnt more about the process.
I enjoyed your newsletter and you have an extremely interesting site. I will be placing my first order in the next couple of days."
So have you ever tried designing? What did you do? Would you like to learn more about designing on this website?
