Early 2020 I did some cross stitch for the first time in forever. I wanted to make a cushion cover of a bandmember of one of my favourite bands, Flake, the keyboardist in Rammstein.
I found a photo I like online from the Sehnsucht album artwork. I changed the image to grey scale because I don’t have a colour printer. Subsequently, I reduced the number of colours to four because that’s the number of coloured yarns I have of the same weight. I then reduced the resolution so that the number of pixels, crosses, would fit onto the piece of Aida cross stitch fabric I had. It might be worth doing these things in a different order to see if the results are different and then pick the result you like best.
I selected neon colours that do not reflect the shade in the original photo so the result would be more ‘artistic’ than like a photo. I could have also used, for instance, purple only, but use four shades of purple so the result would still have the right kind of shading.
I used a ruler and pen to define the pixels in the design, and each pixel will be made by one cross. I then had to start stitching! It took such a long time because I wasn’t experienced. I did eventually find a routine so the back ended up looking somewhat neat too, sort of.
Unfortunately I ran out of the blue yarn I used for the background. A friend then suggested to put the musician’s name at the bottom of the image so I would not need as much background colour, and I am very happy with this solution. The lesson is to always have more yarn than you think you need.
In order to make this into a cushion cover I made a rectangular piece of fabric with a zipper in the centre, and stitched the cross stitch onto it. I then found a cushion to fill the case.
