Looking for a fun project for your summer vacation? Hoping to get started on Christmas presents? I'll walk you through every aspect of how to design, prepare, stitch, and even frame your own cross-stitch portraits to give away as gifts for weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, and other big life events! After designing and stitching over 500 unique portraits, I've compiled all my tips and tricks into one, easy-to-use book with mix and match templates!
I’m trying to collect these so we can find them in one spot.The 2nd Edition of the DIY Book is now available-click here to learn more! We've retired the 1st Edition, both physical and digital versions. Since you made it reading this far, maybe you would like to read some other reviews from publications. I provide free mockups to show you what your stitching will look like as well, so there is no obligation if you aren’t completely happy with the way the chart will look. I will work to clean up your image and either eliminate it or edit image to reduce emphasis on areas less desirable to the eye. If your images have even the slightest areas that aren’t perfectly clear, these software options aren’t your best option. There is a lot more to getting a great chart than just putting image into the software, but as you can see you’ll get pretty excellent results if your image going in is fairly clear like these are. We completely customized my service to your wants and needs for the piece you want to create.
I edit your image to make it as close to ideal for whatever software I use in the end. What I did here is nothing like what my service is for custom charts. I prefer using different pieces of software based on what the customer wants or what my goal for the chart is. So there you have just generic image loaded and you can see that there is a difference. You may consider these biased if you would like, but I did try my best to be unbiased and just show results. I didn’t restrict number of colors at all for these comparisons.
(I use these.) PC Stitch, I just upgraded to 11, so it was using fresh install with the default settings. I have changed default settings in both Pattern Maker and Cross Stitch Platinum any changes from default I made were to change results for better. This will allow you to do the comparison for yourself. I use this software so I have no reason to talk badly about any of it. I will load them into the software creating a mockup 100 stitches wide for simpler image and 150 stitches wide for more complex. I will not edit or manipulate these in any manner. The one is rather simple and the other more complex with blending in background. I’m going to use these two images of fly eyes. I actually own many more pieces of cross stitch software, but these are pretty popular choices, so we’ll compare with them today. I’m in a unique position to compare this software because I own so a good deal of different software, plus I enjoy doing little comparisons.
Which cross stitch software is best? Well, the answer is more complicated than that, so I’ll run a little demo here with PC Stitch Pro, Hobbyware Pattern Maker, Cross Stitch Platinum Plus, STOIK, KG Chart, PhotoPad, Crosti, Pic2Pat, Thread-Bare, and StitchYourPhoto.