skater43 stitches non-Zelda things

[skater43]

Me too. Was definitely feeling a lot better after talking with them. Sometimes, it just takes another perspective or some one coming at it with fresh eyes. And yes, they do know their stuff. And I've got no qualms plugging their site again https://www.the1artery.com/

Bit of a delay, but we'll finish the picture part of this this week. Haven't been happy with the blue for our hero. Rejected my initial choice because it was too close to the background color. Chose another blue I had, stitched the top half of him and thought it worked okay. But I wasn't completely happy because again, it wasn't standing out enough. Stitched the yellow/skin tone of our hero and that helped, but I wasn't satisfied. So I stopped by Michael's on my way to work Monday and picked up three other blues I thought would work. Get them home and they were still okay, but not great. Poking around my threads, though, I found a couple of bright blues, I think that I used for Link's Awakening or Majora's Mask. Stitched one leg of the hero with one of them and I really like it. I think the problem before was trying too hard to match the color in the picture, instead of working with the real life colors. So the delay will be taking out the blue I won't be using. Did some today and that will be tomorrow's stitching time project. Seeing now that I should have made a decision on the blue before doing the skin tone as that's making it harder to take out the bad blue stitches, but we'll manage. But as I said, we'll still finish this part by the end of this week. Which means depending on how the text goes, I may actually be completely done by the 23rd, though chances are I'll take my time and shoot for the 26th. Which is still ahead of my original goal of the 30th, even with a couple of delays/setbacks.

[skater43]

Happy Easter, all. We have made great progress and finishing by Saturday is almost assuredly going to happen. Couple hiccups along the way, but overall, things are moving along nicely. As you can see, we've finished the picture portion of the project and have started the text. Ballparking things, I was figuring about 4 letters a day. 35 letters (including the question mark, which is basically the same size as a letter), meant about 9 days to do the text. Did about half the first W on Friday and did an extra 10 minutes or so of stitching yesterday and you can see we've greatly exceeded the 4 letters a day prediction. I do 4 a day, we'll finish Friday. I do 5 or 6 letters a day, we're finishing Thursday. So barring any unforeseen circumstances, we'll easily finish this week and get into the hands of The Artery.

Couple of minor setbacks as I said, between realizing I'd not measured things correctly and not being happy with my color choice. Since the start of the project, we've prolly only lost a couple of hours, though, so nothing too major/nothing we can't easily make up. And even with those minor hiccups, we'll still finish at least a week earlier than my first prediction, so I'm very happy. So we'll get this turned in this week, then jump back into Twilight Princess. October/November, we'll look into our AGDQ 2023 prize, but don't have anything on the docket until then, so we might be able to finish TP before then? At least get the vast majority of it done, which means finishing it this year is rather likely.

[Pyper]

That new blue looks good for it. I can see why it would be hard to get the right blue to really pop on that fabric. Sometimes you just gotta play around till you find a colour that looks right, even if its less "correct"

[skater43]

Yeah, I'm very happy with what I ended up with and while it look a little bit to get there, the end result was worth it. Using an odd color for the background does make choosing thread color a little trickier, but not having to stitch the floor saved me a ton of time. And yeah, sometimes you have to play around with colors to see what works. For my Donkey Kong picture a few pages back, I had to change thread colors because two I had chosen were too close together in shade and you couldn't really distinguish them. Nice thing about doing a set pattern is some one else has already done the hard work of figuring out the colors, whereas for these types, it's up to me to try and match what I see. And as we saw here, sometimes you have to go out a little ways rather than trying too hard to match the picture because images on a screen and Aida/thread in real life aren't the same.

Made another dumb mistake this week that cost me a day (left off stitching one day on an E and when I resumed the next day, forgot to look which E in speedrunner and so stitched an extra one. And it took me another 3 or 4 letters to catch that things weren't lining up as they should. So we had to undo what we did and carry on from the correct place). However, we'll still easily finish tomorrow. Think I have 10 letters left or so, and doing 5 a day is no problem. Feeling up to it, may just do an extra half hour or so today, just to finish, but we'll see. We've got plenty of time before the event, no need to rush and taking an extra day isn't really a big deal.

[skater43]

Despite a couple of setbacks, we've finished. Just dropped it off at The Artery, so it's now in their capable hands. Curious to see how the final split picture will look since I haven't done a picture like that before, but think it'll look good and was a nice, easy solution to my blunder that didn't require me starting over. And despite the couple of hiccups and delays along the way, we still finished over a week before my first predictions, so no complaints there (total stitching time, including some un-stitching time, was about 33 hours). And with SGDQ the end of June/start of July (https://gamesdonequick.com/ ) we've got plenty of time to get it framed.

And in case anyone else wishes to stitch this, here's the list of the colors I used (all DMC per usual):
986 is the two stitches of green near the upper left corner
820 is the subtle bit of dark blue (all of 8 stitches) in the lower left portion of the black
3843 is the blue we ended up using for our hero
746 is the skin tone of our hero
BLANC of course, is the white for the electric field, the white parts of the explosions, the text
310 our favorite black for the lines in the floor as well as the hole created by the explosion
3777 is the dark red of the explosion in the lower left part
946 is the bright orange of the explosions
3825 is the lighter orange of the explosions (the part that's mostly next to the white)
224 is only used for a half dozen or so stitches, but two of those are in the middle of the black hole near the bottom of it, and in the upper left part, a little above the two green stitches
645 is the grey for the wall

And so, we shall resume Twilight Princess. As I said, no other stitching projects planned until October/November, so we've got several months to work on it without interruption. Don't know if we'll quite finish by then, but barring some unforeseen setback, I think finishing by the end of the year is very doable. Think we've got a fair amount of solid black in this column as we finish off the back of the wolf, so that will go reasonably quickly. I expect a lot of color switching for the details of Link's face, which will be slower going, but I really haven't looked into it too much. Worry about where we are now and we'll cross the other bridges as we come to them.

[Firehawke]

It looks fantastic! Can't wait to see the framing job!

[skater43]

Thank you. Looking forward to seeing the final product myself. Having the text and picture split obviously came about by accident, but depending on how it looks, that's something I may plan for on future projects. But I'm pleased with how the picture turned out. Changing to the bright blue for the hero was absolutely the right call and worth the time loss undoing the wrong blue. Sometimes "this'll work" is fine, but what I was trying to use wasn't going to cut it.

Happy to be back at Twilight Princess, too. Pretty much have finished Link's ear now and have started doing some of the back of his head. Did a little bit of the black of the back of the wolf today, but general plan is to do everything else in the hoop, then spend a week or so just filling in the black. There's a few spots here and there of other colors, plus bits of Link and such, so it's easier to do those and then know everything else is black. Should have no trouble finishing this hoop by the end of May and think I can finish this column by the end of June. Still over a third of the picture to go once we finish this column, but we're getting there,slowly but surely.

[skater43]

Little bit of a delay (issue with the matte cutter), but just picked up the final product. The split picture obviously wasn't what I'd originally planned, but it works just fine. Because there's a bit of a gap between the pictures, it looks more intended than trying to put the two pieces together. Not planning to do others this way, but because of how the original picture was set up with where the text was and all, we were able to pull it off here. Still a couple of weeks until SGDQ2022, so plenty of time to get it shipped off. This afternoon, we'll be filling out the submission form, then once we get the okay, send it on it's way.

Continuing to make good progress on Twilight Princess. No mistakes/issues of late, so hoop is filling in nicely. Having it filled in by the 26th/next WIP picture is definitely a possibility, but we'll see. One day at a time, one stitch at a time.

[Firehawke]

Ooooh...that looks fantastic!!!

[skater43]

Thank you. I agree that it does look good. Not what I originally intended, but it doesn't look like a mistake/you wouldn't know that's not what I intended unless you saw the original pattern. It's in the mail and expected to arrive Tuesday, so I suspect they'll put it on the list of available prizes towards the end of the week, but we'll see. It's on the list of accepted prizes, but they haven't started sorting what's available when yet. Always impressed with the other prizes, especially the other handmade ones https://gamesdonequick.com/tracker/prizes/39