Cross-Stitching

I'm now in the midst of doing cross-stitching. My friends responses range from why suddenly so effeminate,ah? to who do you like now and what are you making for him?. Joyce also asked what happened to you, why you doing auntie stuff?

Arrgh! You people are god awful lah! It's actually for an art project I'm working on now, which I wouldn't reveal much about yet (or rather, I haven't really conceptualized it in proper yet)

Now cross-stitching is the kind activity suitable for your retired moms and grannies in their rocking chair, sipping their English Breakfasts. It's Yawnsville. It's Boring with the capital B. You'll need both your hands and your eyes. Since the only things that's left free are my ears in this really mindless activity, I'll have my music on, catching up on songs that I never knew existed in my mp3 collection. I also listened to the podcast the mrbrown show. The only way to keep going was telling myself that this is going to be an interesting piece of work lah.

I've checked up on some of these software that lets you plot the pattern digitally, such as PCStitch. It's pretty cool as it allows you to convert your photographs into cross-stitch patterns.


I remembered watching a show about a Singaporean guy who actually does this kinda cross-stitch portraits for a living. Must kowtow, the guy had the patience. And for people who wouldn't mind cross-stitching for a living, you could probably take his idea and do something similar too.

But anyway, it's not like I've got a complicated design to work on, so I didn't think I'm ready to purchase one of these cross-stitching software instead (around US$79 each). The trial version of the software also didn't allow me to save any of the designs I've plotted.

Some people actually painstakingly planned their pattern by plotting them on graph paper, but I'm far too lazy for that.

Instead, I've found a free, and not so painful method: By plotting the cross-stitch pattern on an Excel Worksheet. Ingenious, huh?! I don't have Microsoft Office, so I use the open-source OpenOffice instead, which has their version of Excel, Calc.

And here's a preview of my pattern on a spreadsheet.


I actually converted the cells to have the same height and width (0.15cm x 0.15cm) to make the spreadsheet similar to graph paper, and changed the colour of the cells accordingly.

And no, I didn't come up with the font myself. I bought the font pattern, called Garfield Font,from a shop for SGD$2.00 (the shop auntie photocopied it from a book). Audrey thinks I'm stupid for paying for the pattern when I could just get free ones online, and she threw me this website for free cross-stitch patterns for numbers and alphabets.

Now who else wants to join the cross-stitching club? We can gossip while we fiddle with needle and thread.

Some other links you can check out:
Cross-Stitching Softwares at Download.com
DP Software - Cross-Stitching Software