I only had a partial picture of this piece in my Fandom Fun post but I finally finished it and wanted to show it off a little! Pictured below are nine crests from the old anime Digimon Adventure (plus the crest of kindness from Adventure 02) and their corresponding digi-egg (or digitama, as the show called them).
This is a pattern I’ve made myself and it still isn’t 100% completed, some of the crests look close to what they should but not quite right, and some will likely always look a little off. It’s not a simple task to try and replicate something hand drawn in something that is cross stitch, especially when trying to be simple with it. I’ve done my best but there were two bumps in the road that I ran into while trying to plan out the pattern: references and the material.
By reference I’m referring to the actual reference pictures I used to make the designs. To begin with not all the digi-eggs have great reference pictures available. The egg for gomamon (top row, last column) is off, mostly because the first reference picture I used had the polka dots at different sizes. Then I checked again (after already making the digi-egg) and I saw that the polka dots were all supposed to be uniform. I’ve fixed the pattern but I didn’t want to undo and re-do the egg on the cross stitch. For some eggs, even though there are reference pictures, it’s not easy to swap them over to a small cross-stitch pattern. Take the hearts on the second egg in the first column. The hearts on the egg are supposed to be at an angle (technically, the egg with red hearts are also supposed to be at an angle) but it’s really hard to use a small amount of squares to make a heart shape that’s not either upright or on its side. Finally I’ve got another digi egg that I was transcribing the pattern for and the egg isn’t an exact “egg” shape. The scene it’s in has the egg doing the 8-bit bop, where the little icon is going up and down, meaning the frames stretch taller and then contract shorter. Getting an exact pause on the right frame was a pain and that meant tht the image I ended up using is a little stretched out.
For the material, there is the general and specific material of doing a counted cross stitch piece. Simply by the nature of being counted cross stitch the design will be a little blocky. You either need to simplify what you are doing in order to make it fit or you need to make it very large in order to add all the nuance you want to the design. I’ve tried for a happy middle ground, making it large enough that you can see the general shape, but small enough to include all of the crests in a reasonable space.
The actual material limitation is the fact I’m trying to use up old thread from other projects, rather than going out and getting new thread. While it’s nifty to have the thread on hand, it does mean that the colors might be just slightly off from what the reference material usually shows. It’s not awefull, but I’ll admit it could be better. Some of the colors are a little too bright, or a shade off the right shade of blue. It’s not enough to ruin the piece but it is noticeable to those who know.
Even so I’m rather proud of the pattern and it makes me happy to look at, so I’m counting it as a success.
