The last few months I have been working on new project that will involve my love of fabric, needlepoint and tapestry; my love of Poultry, fishes, birds and Folkart will feature alot.  For many years I’ve loved these bright coloured domestic scenes, often painted on wood panels, or embroidered on family heirloom cottons.

I made a decision last year to embrace AI to work alongside my own illustrations. Time is a factor, at 57 years old with many projects running alongside each other, I need to practical way to generate my ideas. AI was perfect. 

I have lots of motives I wish to incorporate and ultimately turn these into a regular income stream by way of cross stitch and needlepoint. 

This week I was introduced to the world of “dithering”, whereby the software used to create patterns reduces your colour count from say a maximum of 200 shades to 50. One this is cheaper for the stitcher to buy fewer shades and simplifies the detail but in doing so you compromise the pattern detail and quality of colours. Dithering is a way of tricking the eye into seeing colours that don’t exist.

Fotlr example red and blue when combined can make purple and mauve. That’s 4 colours. Lovely. But if you can only have 2 colours then the dithering combines these two colours of red and blue as alternative stitches. Like pixels, the alternating blue and red combination is seen as mauve or purple. However I am finding I am loosing brightness. So I am researching software and the help of a few stitchers.

One method is to Vecor these images. By that the colour pallete is reduced and flatterned into blocks of colour. I can choose what colours and then dither is not really needed. Again a bit if research needed to convert my JPEGs to Vector.

I have many designs but a bit if a slog to convert them, design into criss stitch then make ready the stitching guides and upload to my website and Etsy. Its going to be a year long project whilst I tackle my Poultry Science course till August when I may start a degree with Edinburgh University for the same subject, write my children’s books and work with my husband on our training centre.  I feel a bit like a headless chicken sometimes! 😆