Twins Birth Announcement Cross Stitch

For the past month or so I have been working on the twins birth announcement cross stitch pictures. For each grandchild I have cross stitched a picture.

Kylie's picture

Haylee's picture

Brayden's picture

Nicole looked online for a nautical cross stitch picture and couldn't find anything she liked. She did find a picture on Etsy that she liked. For every cross stitch picture I have made whether for the grandkids, for my friend Jodie's children or for me I have used a pattern. So she showed me this picture and said I could make the twins' pictures from it.

Mind you this is a picture and it's not even a cross stitch one. At first, I thought she was crazy. I have never made a cross stitch picture without a pattern. I didn't know how to make the boat, how to do the font, how to make the pattern, nothing. I'm not sure if you are familiar with cross stitch or not but there are a lot of x's to make up the picture. I couldn't think how I was going to convert all those curves in Noah and Jackson's name to x's. This was going to be hard.

I started looking online for nautical clip art in cross stitch. Nicole wanted a boat and an anchor and I was lucky enough to find a web site that had the patterns so I printed it out. Then it was on to the font. I went into Microsoft Word and went through all the fonts trying to find one that came close to the font. The same font is being used for their first letter in their name, the month, the day and year. Then a different font is being used for the pounds, ounces, inches, time and state. Then the font that took the longest to find was one for their names. Nicole liked the fanciness of this one so she would find one she liked online, I would print it out on cross stitch graph paper then pencil it in with x's in blue and red colored pencils then she would look at it and decide if she liked it or not. We went through a couple fonts before she found one she liked. After I found all the fonts I had to print them on graph paper and measure it against the picture above to get the right size. I went through several sheets of paper before I got the sizes right on everything. 

Now it was time to create a pattern. I taped two pieces of the graph paper together and started making a pattern. I would hold the picture under the graph paper to figure out the layout and where everything should go. For Jackson the layout is pretty much like this one except he got the anchor. We decided to leave out the city so Virginia is just at the bottom. For Noah he got the boat and we switched it so that the boat, weight and inches is on the right side and the day and time is on the left side. Nicole decided on red and navy for the thread, Noah's boat has some white in it too. 

A couple weeks ago I had finished both of the pictures, except their names. Last week Nicole finally gave me the go ahead on the font for their names so I finished those up Saturday night. Here is the finished product except for the items that I can't do till they are born.

you can click on the pictures for a better view

So far I like how they have turned out. Their names is what scared me the most. The finished picture should be around an 8x10 and with the matte and frame it should be bigger. How do they compare against the original picture? What do you think?