hi!! i love your cross stitch pieces so so so much. would you ever consider releasing patterns?
I write all over my patterns so I don't really have any of the ones that I've used in the past, unfortunately! But luckily cross-stitch (the way I do it at least) is more an effort of hundreds of hours of work and not necessarily a lot of creativity so I can tell you how I make them!
The website pic2pat is a blessing -- that's what I use to generate the patterns. For the first handful I did, I just did a lot of random guesswork on the size and didn't do any kind of editing on the screenshot before I uploaded it. For the first Impurity hoop and the Isolation hoop, I just sort of did my best to square up the image in the center and didn't worry about filling it out to the edges at all. For the Decay and Extraction and Memories hoops, I did the same thing only I made the pattern a lot bigger than my hoop size and just kind of did a bunch of estimation to make the image fill out the hoop as a circle the way I wanted it to. It's less work on the front-end, but then when you go to actually start stitching you have to do a LOT of double-checking and counting squares on your cloth to figure out where the elements are going to wind up, which can be very rough lol.
Lately, I've decided that's annoying so I've actually taken the time to measure my hoops exactly, and then I'll make a square canvas in procreate, drop the screenshot in there and get it to fill the square the way I want it to (depending on the screenshot, you might have to do some drawing here -- the totheark videos are shot in a rectangular aspect ratio, so trying to put them in a square can lead to either cropping out some details or leaving gaps at the top and bottom. I've usually been erring on the side of including all the details I want and then going in to paint in an extension of the top/bottom of the frame so it'll fill out the whole circle. I usually try to aim for some level of photo-realism, but you do lose some image quality when you convert it to stitching, so you don't have to get Too hung up on it), and then draw a circle over top to use as a reference for where the hoop is. Then you can upload that image to the pic2pat site and have the pattern generated the exact size of the hoop so you wind up doing less counting/guesswork.
For the colors, I usually start at the bottom with the least amount and pay close attention to the level of detail that I'm looking for. Depending on the size of your hoop, the amount of thread you need can quickly become a little absurd so I do usually try to cap it at around 14 colors since you often need multiple skeins of thread per color -- lately I've been aiming for fewer to save money.
THEN once you download the pattern you can mark out the the horizontal/vertical center row (the patterns generate the number of rows on the side, so that's relatively easy), and then I'll do the same for the actual hoop (a little harder, since you have to actually measure stuff, although honestly I mostly eyeball it lol). Then you can get started!
The important thing with cross-stitching like this though is that you're Going to miscount things. I don't go stitch by stitch like a knitting pattern because I imagine keeping multiple active threads in the same row from tangling/getting stitched to the cloth would be a nightmare. instead, I usually pick a color and will work by only filling in those stitches all over the hoop. You're almost certainly going to miscount the number of squares here and there and wind up throwing off the entire pattern because you filled in a bunch of sections in the entirely wrong place. The fact that the pattern generates on multiple pages can kind of exacerbate this since you might miscount rows between pages (although you can print them out and cut the edges out to tape the page together so it aligns in an actual single square). Usually this isn't all that big of a deal honestly -- because you fill out every single square, a lot of the time this is equivalent of being off by a few Pixels, so it's not very noticeable. Sometimes I do pull it up, but mostly I just go back in and mark off the squares on the pattern that I filled in 'wrong' and then will rework the pattern Around those stitches to move things back into place sort of.
I wish I was better at taking WIP images so I could actually show you what I mean, but hopefully this was enough to sort of give you an idea of what I'm talking about lol. And a few jumping off points.
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