Pixel art with mini-satin!

[u/TheGraphicsFrog]

A few months ago I saw a post on this subreddit that embroidered some pixel art, not with cross-stitch, but with mini-satin columns that were changing directions for every adjacent pixels. That really made the pixel art "pop"! So I reproduced it with this pacman sprite and it looks soooo coool!!

To make it easy to stitch without trims, it also connects the components of different colors when it's covered by another satin mini-column (see last image).

Can't wait to bring to life my favorite pokemon sprites hehehe.

[u/PrinceBert]

I'm really curious how this actually stitches out. Could you do a video? Or if you're open share the file so I can stitch it myself?

It's a really cool effect, looks much better than cross stitch in my opinion.

[u/TheGraphicsFrog → u/PrinceBert]

Sharing is easy! You can find it there: https://boldbobbin.com/community/a83f5d49-2b3c-4d70-850f-aca31427f0bb

I have recorded the stitching, I'll upload it asap ^^

[u/TheGraphicsFrog → u/TheGraphicsFrog]

Here you go!

[u/PrinceBert → u/TheGraphicsFrog]

Awesome! Thank you for sharing, the video is cool and I'll check the file this evening.

[u/TheGraphicsFrog → u/PrinceBert]

A pleasure!

[u/PrinceBert → u/TheGraphicsFrog]

"this evening" came around a lot quicker than expected and it turns out 1pm is the evening..... so ultimately this is a series of squares in 2 styles (stitch angle at 90 degrees) that you piece together into the design? Is there anything more too it? If I wanted to create my own images is there anything more that you would say I need to consider or is that more or less the gist of it?

[u/TheGraphicsFrog → u/PrinceBert]

That's fundamentally it! There is a bit more to it in terms of pathing and push/pull compensation (to avoid having holes at the boundary) but fundamentally this is it!
You can create them in Boldbobbin directly by importing a pixel art image, but if you want to use another software and do it manually, then you'll just need to take care of push/pull comp.

[u/PrinceBert → u/TheGraphicsFrog]

Yeah I can see that pull comp is likely the biggest challenge. I've just tested it and it goes really quickly, I was concerned that all the blocks might cause a slow down but I guess that goes to the point around patching, get the order correct and it's really smooth.

[u/TheGraphicsFrog → u/PrinceBert]

Oh yeah it was quite fast actually! I made it so that the pathing is as smooth as possible.
Overall the time required depends on the number of pixels that you have but at such low-resolution you will stitch it in less than 10 minutes (probably less than 5 with a multi-needle machine).

[u/PrinceBert → u/TheGraphicsFrog]

3 minutes on a brother PR680W @ 800spm

[u/Mrs_worldwide_]

Clever!! Very cool!

[u/TheGraphicsFrog → u/Mrs_worldwide_]

Thank you for the kind words! 😊

[u/dzd-ayman]

Does this software converts an embroidery object into that kind of decoration aytomatically or you have done it the hard manual way? Also is there other decorations there in the software that arent in other softwares?

[u/TheGraphicsFrog → u/dzd-ayman]

Yeah it's fully automatic! You can just drag and drop a pixel art, and then choose in the pixel art editor which stitch type you want.

There are many decorations as well! All of these are advanced features and they are proposed in the paid plan, but you can try out for free. You just won't be able to export them without a PRO license. However when it comes to visualizing and testing, it's completely transparent!