I finally found what, to me has been like the Holy Grail.

Seriously, I have actually been searching for these for about 2 years. Jewellery pendant frames. In fact, if you read my last post you’ll know about my recent quest on the road of life. Well, perhaps if I had found these 2 years ago, things might look a bit different. But everything happens for a reason and this is now, so here we go.

This also meant I have done something I’ve been promising and threatening for a long time. I finally got my original Skull in profile pattern converted to a digital file. 

Here’s how I did it:

First I took the original image I worked off to create my hand drawn pattern. He’s looking a bit scruffy, but no probs. I traced out the main sections, trying to simplify as much as poss. This took a couple of attempts but here’s what I got:

As I was planning to miniaturise these right down, I was experimenting to see what kind of detail I could get and also  what my cross stitcher software was going to pick up. But first I had to colour him in:

I just did this in Paint.net, nothing fancy. Finally I converted this image into Cross Stitcher. This was the most time-consuming bit as even thought this is digitally coloured, the program seems quite sensitive so thinks some of these colours are purple or green or whatever. So a little bit of adjustment needed.

Even though I had a lot of fabrics in my stash, none was quite as fine as I needed to get down really small – like 1.5inch small. So for the time being to see how he worked up I used 28 count evenweave and 2 ply cotton in tent stitch. Here’s how he turned out:

I completed this over the past weekend, took me a couple days casual-ish stitching. He measures about 5cm across. Way too big for making into jewellery. But a really useful experiment – good to practice tent stitch (NOT as easy as it seems, not to get perfect every time at least, and NOT half cross stitch either). Also I feel so-so about him; colours are off (I find this is a drawback of using Cross Stitcher as the colours it ‘sees’ are really strange). shading etc. Too much detail, considering I need this to be half as big.

So, some lovely Newcastle linen in 40 count and Silk gauze in 48 count arrived today. I’ll see what I come up with over this week.