We know many of you will be busy around the holidays, and frankly so will staff.
We also know many of you are not artists / designers. But we'd like to push you to try if you haven't before.
So this time your quest is to design a small seasonal cross stitch pattern. Whether it's Christmas, Hanukkah, Mari Lwyd, or Yule. It doesn't have to be a winter holiday! It could be Halloween, Ostara, St Patrick's Day, Holi, etc.
If you don't celebrate anything, a seasonal theme works too! Something summery, spring themed, autumn colored, or winter vibes. It's up to you!
Your pattern can be whatever size you want, but the larger you make it the more work it will be for you.
Please also keep in mind these are public on the site and considered free for anyone to stitch.
We know you're going to have a lot of questions, so we'll try to answer them in advance.
- 'Small' means different things to everyone. If you just want a 20x20 design, that's fine. If you think 100x100 is small, (Like a text design with a lot of blank areas) that's cool too. If you're having trouble designing in a small space, scale it up a bit. Basically, by 'small' we mean something you could potentially stitch up in a reasonable time frame if it came up for a quest.
- As to how you create your pattern, that's up to you. You could use a program like WinStitch or PCStitch. They have free trials, too. You could use a pixel art program instead and just zoom in a bit and apply a grid. You could use a free online tool like StitchFiddle. You could doodle it on graph paper and scribble it in with colored pencils.
- For safety, your pattern should be submitted as an image file, or a photo of the notebook you drew it in. To be uploaded to the site and will be considered free for others to use.
If you need help with figuring out how to export your pattern, please ask! If you're using a free trial of a program and can't export; a screenshot that includes the design and color palette will suffice!
Resources
If you know of other good resources, share them! You are not in any way required to BUY software for this quest! There are plenty of free options, and most paid software has free trials.
- Lord Libidan's list of pattern software - Includes PC, Online(Website), Mac, iPad, and Android options!
- Printable Paper - If you don't have any graph paper, you can print some out!
- C.R.A.F.T - How to make a cross stitch pattern (with graph paper)
- Drawing Pixel Lines - Learn to pixel curves!
- Luke's Tutorials - I've found these pretty helpful with basics.
- Lospec - A big directory of tutorials.
All done? Reply here with your pattern image and tell us what inspired you!
If you did this quest back in January 2021 on the discord feel free to re-submit the piece you did then, design a new one, or both!
Reward Once you've turned in your project, please wait patiently. A council member will assign you the appropriate item soon. :)