This year as I’ve been working on two pieces from The Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery, I’ve been sharing my progress on Instagram and enjoying the community of other people working on the same patterns. I’ve done cross stitch on and off since childhood, and I’ve never strayed from following the patterns exactly as written…but it didn’t take long before I noticed that some people tweak the designs — in small ways and big ways — to make them truly their own. I soon found myself doing the same thing!
The first time I modified a pattern was for the February block of my Once Upon a Time sampler. There was text along the side in the original that I wasn’t hugely fond of, so I replaced it with a few additional arrows and cupcakes copied from other portions of the pattern. I didn’t create anything new, but I used what was already there and gave it a twist. I did the same in April, again to remove the “zzz…” text.
But when part 3 of the Halloween Town club came out, the bakery didn’t seem to fit what I was hoping for in my own piece. It seems like a lot of people felt the same way, and I saw more modifications to this portion of the piece than to anything else I’d seen to date. For mine, I decided to keep the bulk of the building intact, but decided to modify the top.
(This is a copyrighted pattern, so I will not be posting a chart of my modifications. There was a great FB thread with the Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery creators about their feelings towards modifying their patterns. The summary is: they enjoy seeing creative changes but don’t like people posting complete redesigns. If you want to stitch your own, I encourage you to purchase the pattern from The Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery! They have so many great designs.)
Redoing the top of the bakery is the first time I’ve had to come up with something on my own. I started out by looking at a lot of modifications others had made and posted to Facebook or Instagram. I saw a lot of neat ideas, but nothing that fit exactly what I was hoping for. I then turned to good ol’ Google and did an image search for “spooky house.” Those images, combined with what I’d seen others do, finally helped me narrow down what I wanted.
I made my modifications in Illustrator using three different layers. The bottom layer is the original pattern, pulled in from the PDF file. The top layer is a grid that I use to line things up correctly. The middle layer is where I do my work — tracing the parts of the existing pattern that I want to keep, and then adding in my own changes.
Since I’d like to try my hand at designing a few simple cross stitch patterns in the future, I feel like this little exercise had two benefits. First, it helped me tweak my Halloween Town piece into something I love even more. (I’ve still got the bottom section to stitch before it’s complete.) And second, it’s given me a little more insight into translating images (some real, some in my head) into a pixelated pattern. I look forward to more stitching — from patterns and not!
Kathleen says
I really want to try designing cross stitch patterns too. I’ve never done anything like that, so thanks for the tips on getting started. 🙂
Paulette says
Hello your post was very interesting I was wondering to creatr a mini pattern because I really felt inspired by the pumpkins I used cross stitch 2 go in my iPad so it was easy, I’m trying to find a software to permitted me to use symbols and colors at same time like the patterns by the pumpkins but I can’t find anything yet
Paulette says
Hi I found lot of information that I would like to share with you, do you have a mail to contact to you ? 😀