Cross Stitch Pattern Quality Rant
I noticed when I search for patterns on Etsy that are of cartoons or anime they are full of “confetti”, random scattered one-off stitches of a color. It’s blatantly obvious that these pattern creators were images they found and put through a program to translate into cross stitch pixels without editing or caring about QUALITY.
So here is an example from my most recent custom order of a wolf character:
So I take an image of the character and edit it in photoshop or procreate till it looks right or I draw the character by scratch using the image as a reference.
When I put it into my cross stitch pattern it looks like this
As you can see it’s a mishmash of colors and confetti stitches. And yes if I didn’t care I could send it to my customer this way. But I care about quality and making my patterns easier to stitch for beginners.
Just look at how many threads this pattern would be without editing!
And obviously I don’t expect my customers to own all 500+ colors. I however do own them and invested hundreds of dollars to do so. They all fit in 4 boxes I decorated with stickers :)
I use my collection to accurately match the colors of the character instead of depending on what the program suggests.
From here I draw out and edit the character pixel by pixel till it matches the subject.
I got the colors down from 131 colors to just 25 colors. But now look at the colors.
The symbols were decided by the program. You can see some of these symbols are very similar to each other. With my dyslexia I know this could be a problem for my customers. So I change all of the symbols carefully to make sure they aren’t too similar. I prefer to use letters, numbers, and math symbols as they are more familiar I find when stitching.
So now the pattern is cleaned up and ready to export to PDF
From here I fix up the PDF from the program to add a cover page, a supplies/shopping list, dimensions per aida fabric size, and my hand drawn cross stitch tutorial.
See how I spend hours ensuring quality in my patterns? Now I only charge $7 for these custom pieces. The sellers I saw posting confetti pieces they’re posting more money for sloppy uncaring work.
It’s a problem with Etsy cross stitch sellers I’ve noticed and wanted to talk about.
Sorry about the long post but this is also a tutorial for new pattern makers I guess.
