The actual version, at http://twitter.com/msbehaviour has the pigtails cropped so I added these in. It also has a headset, but at a 48×48 resolution there weren’t enough pixels to recreate that effectively. The purple is using the DMC E3837 Jewel Effects thread.

When people change their avatar picture, it takes me a little while to adjust, a bit like in person if they’d changed their hairstyle significantly. Avatars represent us, but they also say something about us. Our choice of picture, how frequently we change it, conveys messages to people, whether we intend it or not.

Twitter avatars are one aspect of our ‘face’ in the digital world. As such, I thought it was appropriate to cross-stitch the avatar of someone who has consistently extended my thinking about technology and the ‘virtual world’. I first became acquainted with Helen and Chelfyn from Mohawk Media through their slot on National Radio’s Virtual Worlds with Jim Mora. I then met them at a conference, and over time they’ve become my friends.

Photo based avatar’s are very hard to cross-stitch well. Chelfyn’s though is very abstracted down to just a few colours, so it was really fun to cross-stitch, especially the anti-aliasing.

I used qrencode on Linux to generate the QR code, and PCStitch to make the pattern.

I managed to get 2DSense to resolve it from the cross-stitch, but only when holding it a certain distance away.

I think it might work better with higher count Aida cloth, and more threads (this was 4 threads of DMC 310).

I later found out that a guy called John Young had made one a couple of years before. His was for a pillow cover, and it encoded the URL for the wikipedia entry for ‘pillow’. Looking at his one he’s gone for 2×2 stitches for each pixel, which seems much more likely to be readable by a QR code reader.

Lucy, a friend of ours who owns Felt, an online craft store, turned 30 recently. I wanted to make something for her birthday, so I decided to stitch the Felt logo.

The original logo was very small, so I needed to clean up the pattern a lot, and completely redesign the abstracted flower shapes. Below is the result.

]]> http://serenarex.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/because-i-felt-like-it/feed/ 1 serenarex felt-small http://serenarex.wordpress.com/2009/09/13/golden-axe/ http://serenarex.wordpress.com/2009/09/13/golden-axe/#comments Sun, 13 Sep 2009 19:42:59 +0000 serenarex http://serenarex.wordpress.com/?p=95 Continue reading →]]> After some months of work, here’s the final piece. I may include the blue skeletal hand underneath the characters, at some stage in the future, but for now it feels quite complete as it is.

I quite like the contrast between the rich three dimensionality of the characters and the plainness of the background. They just sort of float there, disembodied from their original context. Hanging in space, ready for a game that will never begin.

Here’s an animation of progress on the woman. I unstitched her face three times, and the boots once to get them right. I couldn’t find the right DMC colours for the boots, but luckily Broomfields had a skein of multihued red, which worked well.

The dwarf’s axe was a bit hard to recognise from the original pattern, so I reworked it a couple of times using the larger axe (from him standing in the front) in a few different colours, until I arrived at this.

.

There’s something that fascinates me about the finished product of craft/art not being the physical object itself, but the digital representations of the object.

People often ask me “what are you going to do with it when it’s finished” when they see me working on a piece of cross-stitch. My answer is almost always “take a photo of it and put it on the web, what else would I do with it?”. The actual finished physical pieces just sit in a folder in a cupboard, they’re not the point of the work, the point is to take things from the digital realm, reproduce them in a medium that takes a lot of effort and thought to give them a vibrancy and three dimensionality, then return them to whence they came.

I think partly this is because all of my career has been about publishing things digitally, but it also comes back to my training as an art historian. The Mona Lisa is not the small, somewhat unimpressive and grimy looking physical collection of dried paintstrokes in the Louvre in Paris, it is the picture of the painting in millions of books, and the memory of the image in the minds of millions of people.

I’m not sure if this thinking goes against the ‘take back control of the material production process’ ethic of the maker/crafter culture, or whether it runs alongside it in a complementary way, as the divide between the digital and physical worlds increasingly and inevitably blur.

I and my son and I had been playing a number of Mame games earlier this year, including Golden Axe. I choose a part of the character selection screen to do, and took out the background, replacing it with just one colour. Here’s the image.

Here are some progress shots.

Golden Axe progress 1

Golden Axe progress 2

I decided to cross-stitch the character selection box from the original Street Fighter II. This had way more colours and more subtle gradations of colour than anything I’d done previously. Fortunately someone had mentioned to me that there was software available that could help turn images into cross-stitch patterns. I got a trial copy of PC Stitch and used it to make patterns of each of the individual characters in the character selection box. Here’s the original screenshot I used.

Here’s the finished piece:

Street Figher II

I went and bought the DMC threads to make Ryu (the top left character), and got started. I used 12pt Aida cloth, and three strands for each thread (DMC cotton comes with six strands per thread).

The software did a fairly good job of getting the DMC colours right, although often I had to use my own judgement. Sometimes this meant substituting one colour for another where there were only a few stitches in the new colour, and I already had a DMC thread that was near enough. This was fine for things like the eye colours, or the reds on Dhalsim, Ken, and E-Honda, that weren’t related to the colours adjacent to them.

Sometimes the software did really well on the fine gradations of skin colour, sometimes it got it really wrong. I had to unpick about 1/4 of Guile, go and buy three more smoothly graded thread colours, and redo the unpicked stitches to get the right result. It felt worth it though, I wanted Guile to be just right as he was the character I played most in the arcade game.

I’m still not quite happy with Dhalsim (the Indian fellow on the bottom right), as the mid tone shades are a bit green. I left him like that though as I was so keen to finish it. I started it in 2003, and only finished it this year (2009). It was so painstaking and fiddly, with so many colours that I often put it aside for a year or so, before picking it up again. The upside is that I now have about 100 colours in my thread collection.

Perhaps one day I’ll redo Dhalsim, or perhaps I’ll just leave him as is, a symbol of my perfectionist tendencies, and my (sometimes) ability to keep them at bay.

The photo above is a straight digital camera photo of the finished work. You’ll note I’ve used parts of it for the header of this blog, and used the magic of the GIMP to straighten out the parts where the tension has made the individual panels not quite square. Hopefully when I frame the piece, I’ll be able to achieve the same thing just by stretching the fabric a bit.

Some time soon I’ll list all the colours I used, and provide the patterns.

All your base are belong to us - screenshot

Then it hit me. I had spent a lot of my leisure time from age 9 to 20 playing arcade games. Arcade games from that period (1979 – 1992) were perfect for cross-stitch patterns. They had a limited colour pallete, 256 for the newer games, and even less for the older ones. The images in the games had all been created as pixel art, rather than using 3D rendering engines.

I had also recently seen the ‘All your base are belong to us‘ flash animation on the web (this was about 2001), and like many people at the time I thought it was clever, and virally compelling.

All your base are belong to us

I decided therefore to cross-stitch Cats, the evil guy from Zero Wing, the arcade game that inspired the flash animation. I simply took a screen shot of the image of Cats, printed it out, then went to a craft store and choose the colours by eye. It went surprisingly well, although the contrast in some areas wasn’t ideal. I finished this some time in early 2003.

The original image of Cats (above) has big purple flowing robes but I didn’t want to spend the time stitching them. They would be beautiful but I didn’t have the patience at the time. If I was doing this one again, I would have done it on black Aida cloth, and maybe just done part of the cowl of his cape.

Somehow though, I quite like the disembodied, ‘bust’ like nature of this piece. It represents the removal (multiple times) of the image from its original context in the Japanese Zero Wing arcade game. That is, the game was ported by Sega Europe who poorly translated the language into English. It was then, years later, made into a flash animation remix that created a viral buzz on the web. I then took it, and painstakingly re-rendered part of it in an archaic, physical medium, normally associated with flowers, teddy bears and other innocuous imagery. Seen here it is so far removed from its inception, that Cats looks somehow more friendly, less evil, and lonely, or lost.

Disclaimer- although I’m now an IT consultant, my undergraduate degree is in Art History, so I may occasionally fall in to verbose, indulgent, grandiloquent and loquacious analyses of my cross-stitch. If I do, please forgive me.

My partner refers to this piece as a geek version of a ‘Home Sweet Home’ sampler that is common in old fashioned cross-stitch.