For my heart design project I wanted to make a cross stitch pattern using Stitch Painter. I chose something that makes my heart happy which would be…Unicorns! I found my prized pony in the land of Fantasia.

Then I made a vector using Adobe Illustrator and saved it as a PNG file. I wanted to use an 8″ loom to frame my cross stitch so I made an 8″ x 8″ box and centered and enlarged my image to the size I wanted.

Then I hit Ctrl + C and copied it into my clipboard.

I’m using 16 count Aida cloth so…

8″ x 16″ = 128

8″ x 16″ = 128

On Stitch Painter I set my document size as 128 x 128 and used an 8×8 grid.

I have the Full Color Import plug-in so I just selected the entire 128 x 128 grid using my Marquee tool and hit Ctrl + V to paste my PNG into Stitch painter.

I clicked and held the image to use the FCI plugin which resulted with this:

My palette had more colors than I wanted to work with so I started whittling down my colors.

I started combing the different swatches by clicking on colors in the Palette panel, and then pressing the ʻfʼ key (f for find) on the keyboard to see where they were and then

To see where a color swatch is used in the document, I clicked on the color in the Palette panel and then pressed the ʻfʼ key which would highlight them.

I combined the colors that were near each other in the document by clicking on the first color, then pressing and holding down the Command Key (Right Mouse button on Win).

I changed a few colors and then used the Clean Up Palette option from the Plug-ins menu.

To see how often I used a color I generated a key from the Plugins menu.

I added a blue major grid line by clicking on a blue color then selecting major grid from the Palette menu.

and now I have my pattern! I can print this off with my stitches and rows numbered on the printout by pressing the Opt key (or Alt key for Windows) when I select the print command in the File menu.

Happy hearts create happy art! Good luck with your own design challenge and be sure to share it with us by emailing us at info@cochenille.com