Cross stitching is far from complicated.
A cross stitch picture is like building up a digital picture. At each pixel location you put a small cross of thread of the correct colour, then next to it you put another cross of a different colour and so on, following a chart.
Creating the chart is actually the hard bit, which is why most people doing cross stitch either buy a chart or ready made kit with the chart, thread and fabric included. Obviously, with the 'Uranos Drops' picture, no chart was available and I had to create it from scratch. Charts can be done either by hand, or with the aid of some software. If done by hand you draw the picture you want on graph paper and allocate thread colours (from the 448 shades available from DMC or lower number from other makers) to each square that represents a cross. If you use software, you can usually take any computer image, edit the image to remove information you don't want, then convert it to the size and colours you want to stitch. I used software.
The software to make charts can be free or paid for, I started with a free piece of software called 'Ryijy Stitch Designer', which can be downloaded here:
http://code.google.com/p/ryijy/
However, I have since written my own software to do the job and extend what can be done to enable the outlining to be defined too. That is available as a free download - the first download down on this page:
http://www.chestnutpens.co.uk/misc/downloads.html
I can usually stitch at a rate of 100 crosses an hour, though on this image, due to the sheer number of colours close together in the figure's leggings and small size of stitches (approx. 1.6mm across), I probably averaged closer to 60 per hour. This puts a limit to the size of computer image that can be conveniently stitched up. A 300 x 240 image will take a year or so if you do 2 hours a day every day...
If you'd like to look at a progress thread for this cross stitch picture as I stitched it up on another forum, it's here:
http://www.crossstitchforum.com/view...hp?f=6&t=25792
There are lots of other amazingly detailed pictures being stitched up on that forum, but unfortunately I've yet to see another Luis Royo.
Regards,
Richard.
