Love is Stored in the Coffee Bean

This past week I made a cross stitch piece for a coworker friend of mine, M., who recently entered into a relationship with her longtime friend. She is totally smitten with this guy – it’s adorable. I have several small cross stitch pieces on my desk, so she asked if I would make her one.

M. really loves coffee – like, she is a straight up coffee snob, which is something I love about her. M. is one of those people who love trying fancy one-off coffee shops, hole-in-the-wall places, places with strong roasts and nitro cold-brew. She has this running in-joke with her man, where he sent her a picture of an iced vanilla latte, but whose “ILV” labeling looked a lot more like “ILU”. It’s all very cute and romantic and mushy.

So, after some back and forth on what this M&M cross stitch would look like, she requested that I make something featuring this iced vanilla latte. Adorable. Here’s the concept art she drew for me.

I don’t know if I’ve ever received concept art before, so I really love this. I was so excited to turn this into a finished piece! (Note: The sunflower was scrapped from the design by M.)

My next task was to translate the concept into a chart. I usually don’t draw my own charts from scratch, both because I primarily work with pre-existing Pokemon sprites and because I lack confidence in my skills as a pixel artist. But, I heard the call, so, OK. I’d try my hand at this design.

So, here is my attempt at a design for a cute little iced coffee! The goal was to stitch something about 2″ x 3″ to fit into a ready-made frame, so it’s a very simple design for a very small area. Still, I like the way it turned out. After a few tweaks to M.’s specifications, I was ready to start stitching.

The charting software I use on my MacBook is called MacStitch by Ursa Software (and there is a version for Windows too). It’s very user friendly, but I don’t always agree with the DMC floss colors it recommends. In this case, I didn’t have most of the floss colors that MacStitch recommended, so I opted to switch them out for appropriate colors that I did have. I did a lot of sight-matching when I first started cross-stitching like 10 years ago, so I’m pretty comfortable going with my gut.

And here is the finished result! I selected a small tabletop frame from Michaels. I love these little frames and I’ve honestly been wanting an excuse to get one, so I’m happy it worked out for this project.

It was a lot of fun to make a design from scratch! I’m really excited to share this, as it is one of the rare examples I have of a “progress” shot of concept art to finished piece. I hope I can do more pieces like this in the future!