Sprite Stitch Board!

Hi everyone!

My friend would like to stitch an image from the cover of an edition of The Silmarillion for her boyfriend. I have tried to make the pattern myself but I could use some help. I tried making the pattern in KG-Chart 100x100 but I find it loses a lot of detail and have found that 150x150 works the best. But it's still got colours all over the place, meaning instead of a portion of it being one solid colour like it should, it has pixels mixed in that are different colours. Looks blurry and makes it more difficult to stitch. I tried lowering the colour count from 25 to 15 and then 10 but didn't find that it made much difference.

I would post my pattern attempt but KG-Chart won't let me save it. I was trying it on 16ct, 25 colours, 150x150.

Any help is appreciated!

I've tried to find a lossless image of this that doesn't have the color gradients, but I've had no luck.

I think there are two problems that you might be running into. The first is that the color gradients make it so that a patch of 1-2 colors will show up as many more (as the colors go from green to yellow, pastel yellow to vibrant yellow, white to green/grey, etc). The second (and more problematic) is that because this is a jpeg, the color of each individual pixel isn't very trustworthy (i.e. a non-gradient area like the center flower petals are actually made up of dozens of differently colored pixels). If you were to zoom in to the image to see each individual pixel, you'll see what I mean.

Unfortunately, the problem is the picture. If your google image search skills are better than mine, and you can find another good quality (hopefully non-jpeg) file, you might have better luck.

Ok, this was on my mind today as I found myself with some time to kill, and no stitching project nearby.

I'll preface this by saying that it turned out bigger than you were going for (not sure if your friend is cool with the extra thousands of stitches )

I made the pattern with 11 colors. Don't bother with the coral border, I couldn't figure out how to delete the background color. The program wanted to either make it black (which would obfuscate the border) or white (which would unnecessarily add thousands of stitches to the white stitch count).

The toughest part for me are the gradients, and getting the threads to transition well. I fiddled around with the transition borders and thread colors. I wasn't sure whether the transitions should be "clean" or "dirty" (i.e. a definite line between the colors, or alternating and patchy between the two areas of color.) The default colors it gave me were pretty questionable. As it is, it looks pretty bad on my screen, but the actual thread colors look a lot better as far as I can tell (I used picture examples of each thread color rather than trusting the RGB colors). That said, if you think a different color would be better, use it!


I'll attach both the image I have (in case you want to try to make your own pattern) and the pattern that results from it (in case it looks good to you).

Anyway, long story short: I tried to help, but I don't really know what I'm doing (just playing around). Maybe you like it, or maybe it just gets you closer to what you're actually looking for. Either way, good luck! (and to your friend as well)

Hi Hrontajkpa
I think i'm going to try your pattern! I'm new to stitching and i found this forum which is kinda silent for a while now. But thank you for posting this

Cool! Wow, this is a pretty large project for someone new to stitching. I don't mean to scare you off (if you're committed, definitely go ahead), it just would have been way too big for me when I started stitching. Nevertheless, good luck! Come back and share some progress pictures and/or the completed thing, we'd all love to see it! And welcome to the forums!

well here we go I think i'll continue parallel projects but i want to see how this one will turn out. I wanted to create some images using gimp but until now i couldn't succeed. I want to decrease the colors used in mostly world of warcraft stained glass artwork but until then Silmarillion will be my biggest project. Thank you again!

A small update since August I've been fighting with vertigo and during recovery i continued with small projects. I just get a hold of it, so I hope to progress even more during the coming months!

This looks so cool I'm glad you're still working on it. About how big is that going to end up?

I think it will make 15x15 inches. It started to come up together. I had to take a bit of time due to my health issues but i started back on this project.
It's been a great project for me. At first I used regular mouline floss with 2 strands but it doesn't look all good. then cotton perle 12 2 strands were too much needle couldn't move. now i continue with cotton perle no:8 which seems appropriate for my fabric. if i cannot find the color on perle I'll switch to 3 strand muline.
What do you say about the coral filling? I kinda like the idea of filling the corners just like the pattern

It's looking great! Hope you are feeling better after your battle with vertigo!!!