February’s here! This month’s hobby is Cross-Stitching. I’ve been looking forward to cross-stitching so much. Since January had to be devoted to setting up the website and planning my hobbies, ’cause it’s logical and helpful to do the planning beforehand, it means that February was going to be the first month that could have a specific hobby assigned. I’ve been wanting to resume cross-stitching since December, so this month was the first available spot. I took the last two weeks of January to start planning ahead, and I made some preparations.

I’ve found StichFiddle! It’s a website that has, among other things, the ability to convert images into patterns for various crafts. I decided to use it for cross-stitching, but perhaps I will continue to use it for crocheting, for example. My initial idea was to make a very big project that’d be 256 by 256 pixels, or stitches in this case. I am still going to start that project, but seeing as I comfortably finished a 64 by 64 project in about two weeks, I couldn’t ever finish this 256×256 project in a month. That’s why I decided to put the 256×256 project on the side and go for another one for this month. I have two pieces of Aida fabric, both fit perfectly for their corresponding sizes. I found a cute icon of my favourite character of Honkai: Star Rail and decided to make a 128×128 pattern for it on StitchFiddle. It takes some adjusting, since the program only converts to DMC (yarn brand) colour codes for now, but I figured it out. I was able to change the brightness, contrast and pick the colours I wanted and exported it as a PDF. The PDF file, which I will upload near the end of the month, has three versions of a multiple-page pattern; one with the coloured grid, one with symbols for each colour and one that’s a combination of the two. Included in the file is a list of all the colours used in the pattern and their corresponding DMC colour codes. I am also making a Microsoft Excel sheet that’s more detailed. It features the eyedropper colour-picked colour codes directly from the pattern, their names, how often a colour is used (use count) and whether I own the colour. This file will be made blank (in terms of owned colour) and along with the pattern, it will be available for downloading on my Patreon and Ko-Fi (free) when I’m near finishing my project.

I had to do some shopping… Since my grandma gifted me her yarn box, I have a pretty large variety of colours of yarn. Sadly, she didn’t use DMC that much and I really want this project to be accurate, so I decided to take my colour list and go buy new yarn. I sorted the colour list by highest use count and bought the top 15 for now. DMC is a relatively expensive brand of yarn, at least in my local hobby shops. There are 114 different colours used in the pattern, but I already own some of them including the ones I now bought and a lot of the colours in the pattern are used for 1 to 15 stitches, so I might replace those with a colour I already own to save money. Eventually, I’d like to own all DMC colours. I feel pretty comfortable using StitchFiddle and I expect to use it in the future as well, so I intend to switch over to DMC as my main brand and use my other yarn for spare. I gave myself a budget of €50,- for every month and if I end up not spending all, it will transfer over to the next month. Since January (Website & Planning) was nearly free except for the domain name, I had almost all of January’s funds to take with me into February. I still made purchases for February in the last days of January, since I wanted to be prepared and make sure I could start as soon as February started. That failed; I started the project a few days early. I just couldn’t wait, and I wanted to know if I would run into problems during the stitching so I could potentially solve them before February started. Luckily, I didn’t run into any problems and I’ve gotten a head start on the project.

I will upload progress photos during the course of the month under the Cross-Stitching page. This page also features projects I’ve finished previously. For now, I will leave the pattern of the project a surprise until the progress is long underway. Whether I’ll finish the project during this month or not, I will upload the pattern either way, at the end of February.

My apologies for any inconsistencies and reduced functionalities on this website.

Please look forward to more improvements in the future and thank you for visiting Chalunaria!

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