#macstitch

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. 

I have made an other youtube video. This time about how to design this cross stitch pattern using Winstitch/Macstitch.

Designed this for my husband’s aunt and uncle love of the G&T. This is the very first cross stitch that I designed myself, thanks to MacStitch. I found the program to be kind of clunky, but I couldn't have made this without it because I am just not that patient or creative. 

Hi! :) I use MacStitch (WinStitch if you’re not on a Mac, it’s the same thing). It just opens up a blank chart (any size you want), and it has pretty much every single floss color AND brand you can think of!  You can draw, type text (and choose fonts, sizes, etc), import photos, etc.  You can create full and quarter stitches, backstitching, french knots, and there are some capabilities for quilting and things, too.

Once you create the pattern, you can very easily export it.  There are a bunch of settings you can tweak, but you can have a preview page, split the pattern among multiple pages if it’s large, include a color key, all sorts of things.  The other thing I love is, it gives you a “framed view” that puts the image in a frame and shows what it will look like once it’s stitched!

I LOVE this program!  I paid for the Premium version, but their website details the differences between the versions so you can choose whatever works best for you.  They also have a free demo, it has limited capabilities (you can only print their sample patterns), but you’ll be able to get a good idea of how the program works.

I think there are some free programs out there, but I’m not really sure what they are or how good they are.  But I’ll tell you that after I bought this, for WEEKS I drove my husband crazy by saying, “Oh my God, I LOVE THIS! Look at what I can do!”  I haven’t had even a moment of buyer’s remorse.

Hello tumblrinos;

I bought and downloaded macstitch the other day so I could make my own patterns but I am having an issue. There's something wrong with the symbols assigned to each colour. Namely they are all the same symbol, a little skull and crossbones and if I click the icon to change the symbol, then it just gives me about 200 options for the same symbol. The .png file is in the right place, and contains all the symbols, if I manually edit them in the symbol editor it doesn't save the changes.