This week’s question is in regard to purchasing large photo conversion charts from eBay.
I saw a pattern from ebay- rainbow sunset cross stitch (452) and I found it too good to be true. I think it’s a chart generated from a photograph. Can we really crosstitch the pattern to look like the picture that we see? I hope you can help me. Thanks in advance.
I’m always weary of buying charts like this from eBay unless it’s from a cross stitch designer or company I recognize, because you can never be sure if the image to cross stitch conversion was done correctly. While it can be done with excellent results (for example, Heaven and Earth Designs and Mystic Stitch pattern products) it can also be done very poorly and often the results you receive from eBay are of the poorer quality. That’s not saying this isn’t a good pattern… it might be, but it’s a toss up 50/50 chance of what kind of chart you’re really going to get.
Why do I say this? Being familiar with converting image files to charts using software I know that it can be a painstaking process of going through each line stitch by stitch to make sure the floss color is of equal match up to the picture you’re trying to recreate. In a lot of cases the sellers on eBay are just hitting the “convert” button and not making the necessary adjustments to the pattern, therefore you’ll frequently find green where there should be beige, orange where there should be purple, and so on and so forth.
I hopped over to eBay to check this particular pattern out….
….and I do see that the seller has a large number of good feedback and 98% good feedback overall, so it might be worth the gamble if it’s something you really want to stitch. Good results are possible, but so are bad ones.
I wish there was more advice to offer here. If you do purchase the pattern and stitch it I look forward to seeing the finished work! (fingers crossed for good results!)
Happy Stitching!
Yeah, a lot goes into a good conversion. I think the original picture being converted has a lot to do with quality too. If you’re converting a lower quality pic (like a .jpg) you could be converting the “jpeg artifacts” too. Which would make for a halo effect around the picture.
those halo effect stitches are a pain to remove too, takes foreverrrrr to erase them all out
Oh yeah definitely. Ugh.. lol
This is one of the reasons I shy away from converting pics. I tried it a couple times years and years ago. The only way I could get the contrast I liked was to have an insane number of colors.