Birth of a Cross Stitch Chart

Every new idea starts with a simple charcoal drawing. First I look for the right shape: the proportions must be harmonic, individual areas should not be too slender or slim. In the next step, the design is digitized and I use a drawing program to abstract the drawing into the individual pixels. Every pixel already corresponds to exactly one cross stitch. For this step, I prefer the Clip Studio graphics program. The individual contours are optimized and smoothed in a further step. Now the color choice is made. The color palette of the drawing program contains exactly the color range of the DMC embroidery thread company. This enables me to ensure that the finished product can actually be embroidered with the colors that I intended in the planning.

As soon as the colorful pixel image has been finished, all discontinuities and edges are smoothed out by hand. The finished pixel image can now be read into the embroidery software. Now the finishing touches are made, now I can add or delete individual stitches, and I can also change color tones that have not been ideally matched. As soon as the design is in order, the sample templates are created, the embroidery time, the required fabric sizes and the associated thread lengths are evaluated. The results are complete PDF files in A4 format and in letter format.