How Our Kits are Designed.

Where ever possible I work from sketches done in the field although I take photographs to supplement the sketches. Because the weather in Ireland is often wet, or I can only be at the location at a single time, I may have to use artistic licence as to the lighting, sky and weather in the picture - working towards the look, mood or time of day I think will best suit the design. I never work from other peoples' photos of places I haven't seen as I don't believe it possible to catch the essence of a place without having spent some time there.

What looks right in a photographic composition will often look strange if simply traced or scanned into cross stitch software, shapes we accept as "real" because "it's a photo" may be quite distorted when traced - especially the lines of buildings. So, I start by drawing out the picture as flat outline shapes on paper - something I learned to do years ago when planning out silk-screen pictures. I then scan the drawing into CorelDraw on my computer and colour the areas in using flood fills. The great advantage of using a computer is the ability to change colours again and again until they look right. The resulting image is the one I print onto the canvas leaving in the outlines as they help to make clear the boundaries between close colours. First the computer prints onto special paper in an A3 laser printer which cost more than I care to think about and even more to run! Then I take the special paper ( the image is back to front at this stage) and lay it face down on the canvas under a heat press which melts the image onto the canvas.

Finally I scan the image into Cross Stitch Professional to produce a cross stitch chart and to count the stitches and calculate the thread lengths. There, I said that very quickly but actually it takes almost as long going over the design once it is imported into the software as designing the picture took manually. The colours never quite correspond during the scanning and you have to go through the design stitch by stitch. Still it lets me see how the picture will work when stitched and if I have put too small details for stitches to resolve then I can go back and change them in my original design.

You can dowload a trial version of Cross Stitch Professional  by clicking here. It includes a free printer for my charts  which you can use if you order a chart. For more information on my charts and the FREE Celtic Knotwork Frame chart click here.