I love finding free pattern downloads, and this one is especially cute with it’s little Darth Vader. Username Avozika has this design as well as a few others (including a rather pithy Chuck Norris design) for download on her Instructables page.
More Links of Interest
ProcrastaStitch has recently hit the nerdy cross-stitch market. They have fun patterns and book marks and other geekery over on their Etsy shop.
They also have a fun tumblr where you can keep up to date with them and their many projects. I love needlework and I’m always happy when I see needlework+fandom.
After the cut we have a few words from Emma and Lyndsey themselves! Continue reading
A long time ago in a galaxy far far away… or possibly in LA. There was a tapestry to end all tapestries on display. The tapestry, tells the entire story of Star Wars in cross stitch with text, below is the artists description of the work.
A hand-stitched cotton thread on 30 foot of continuous length of 7 stitch per inch Klostern fabric. Stiffened with a thin batting and hemmed with a custom-made printed pixel star farbric on rear. This cross-stitch tapestry depicts the Star Wars saga (so far) from Episode 1 through Episode 6. Quotes from each movie are written in Aurebesh on the surrounding border. Chanelling the Bayeux Tapestry.
That is an epic work.
Natalie Owen worked on the greatest cross stitch pattern I think I’ve ever seen: the Star Wars poster by the Hildebrandt brothers. It’s 13″ x 16″. Natalie used the black cloth to her advantage here and did the piece as negative space, so she didn’t have to fill in all the black spaces with stitches. It used 50 colors of thread.
For me, I known of the Hildebrandt brothers from their Marvel paintings in the 80’s and 90’s (they were Alex Ross before Alex Ross ever was!), and just found out they were the ones responsible for creating this iconic poster.
Since tomorrow is Halloween, it’s the perfect time to feature Jasmin’s amazing cross stitch of everyone’s favourite serial killer, Michael Myers. (From the movie Halloween of course!)
About one million years ago I cross-stitched a whole bunch of forum smileys/emoticons and attached them to note cards for a massive Internet forum-based snail mail exchange. At the time I was pretty sure that what I was doing was ridiculous, but I was having fun, and these were only people on the Internet anyway, so who cared, right?!
Today I received the nicest letter from one of the recipients that I’ve actually kept in touch with after all these years. In it, he explained that crafting had never occurred to him before he received my card, but that he loved it so much he tried out cross-stitch for himself (he actually sent me his first attempt – a Half-Life lambda icon), and that led to him trying out other crafts and projects from knitting, to papercraft, to electronics, and beyond!
So really what I wanted to share with you today was the thought that even though I was sure my little cross-stitch pixel-art cards were daft, they actually inspired someone out there to explore their own creativity, and that is AWESOME.
So keep crafting, folks – inspire away! And you know, looking back I reckon those emoticon cards were actually a pretty cool idea. If I do say so myself :)
