skater43 stitches Zelda games

[blackmageheart]

Oh it's looking so good! I'm so pleased with how it's turning out! <3

[skater43]

Thank you. Really is looking great. Mom says I'm an artist, but I give the credit to those who make the patterns, I'm just following their directions. Big chunk of sky I'm working will be finished Thursday or Friday, weekend spent doing the next chunk of sky. So next week, we start work on the upper right tree/leaves. Working my way up from the bottom of the hoop basically, so more than likely, sometime next week we'll move the hoop up so that we can do the rest of this upper section. Hopefully. Because we're at the top of the picture, I can only move the hoop up so much before we run out of material, so I may have to move it twice to get the very top rows. Hoping I can finagle things though, to only move the hoop once. But we'll worry about that next week. But we're getting there. Still looking at mid-September being completely done, but we'll see how the next couple of weeks shake out. And really looking forward to seeing what the framers come up with. Lots of colors to work with and honestly, I could see going with something a little out there/less obvious like matching some of the purple of Zelda's dress or something.

[skater43]

Things shaping up nicely for Spirit Tracks. Still two, three weeks away from finishing, still looking at early/mid September finish date, but things progressing. Moved the hoop up early last week, so we can finish the rest of the upper right corner from where we are. Done almost all the sky stuff, so just a matter of filling in the various bits of green for the leaves/tree. But, because we're close to finishing, I'm choosing not to give an update pic and will just wait to show off the finished product. Put in an extra hour on Thursday because what else are days off for? So that puts us at 292 hours currently, including today's work. 310-315 looks to be the current final estimate, but we'll see how quickly the next couple of weeks go. Upper right corner has quite a bit I still need to fill in, but it's mostly three colors, so will go relatively quickly. Haven't looked much at the lower right corner, but we don't have a lot to do there, and think it is mostly just a handful of colors, too. So, we'll see how things shake out. But definitely getting close to wrapping this bad boy up.

Check my other thread for my upcoming GDQ projects I'll bust out after we finish Spirit Tracks. Those plus finishing Spirit Tracks should take us until the end of October/start of November. At which point, we'll turn our attention to Phantom Hourglass. Except, I don't have a pattern decided for it yet. Got ideas, but thought I'd give you guys a chance to offer some thoughts, ideas, suggestions. Looks like I've got too many possibles to attach in one post, so apologies for multiple posts, but we'll get them all on here and you guys can throw out some feedback.

[skater43]

Part 2 of Phantom Hourglass ideas.

[skater43]

And one more PH idea.

[Firehawke]

Oooh...these are all such ideas!!!

The one that jumps out to me initially is the 2nd one in the 2nd set (Link and (can't think of the name!) with the Hourglass with the various brown shaded background. The map one is really unique, too!

Good luck deciding...it's a difficult choice!

[skater43]

Haven't decided yet, but that's a real possibility. No boat, but we have the Hourglass, our fairy friend, so still conveys the premise of the game, or at least, one can easily tell which Zelda game it is from. Also realized I'd resized it horizontally, so it was bigger than I really wanted/desired (it's taller vertically than longer horizontally, unlike most of the other ideas, so that threw me off), so I've resized it again from the original. So now we're 150 pixels/stitches in the long direction, but only 101 wide, as opposed to 150x220.

Spirit Tracks is getting finished next week without a doubt. Moved the hoop at the end of stitch time today, so upper corner is done. Also signed it since the white/blue of the clouds and sky up there made the black show up better than on the green of the trees/leaves. Also learned that despite this picture using 80 gazillion colors, black was not one of them. Have plenty of black on hand, so not an issue, but 310 Black is not used anywhere in the picture. But yeah, hoop is in the bottom right corner, have roughly 1200 stitches to go. And much of that is a couple of colors of green, so I'm fully expecting to finish next Tuesday or Wednesday.

[Firehawke]

Ooooh....getting SO close!!! Have fun finishing it up!

[skater43]

Project complete! Final tally is 310 hours to finish this. Put in an extra hour on Thursday because why not. Did an extra half hour yesterday, just because I was down to the last 2 or 3 colors and wanted to finish up all but the last color. Then that last color took about an hour and a half today to finish off. But right in those final estimations as far as number of hours and date of completion. Question came up about speed of stitching and we can give an estimate for this project. 180x180 is 32,400 stitches. Throw in 10 backstitches for Link's belt and another 30 or so for the signature and we get a ballpark of 32,440 stitches. 310 hours to do that works out to about 104.65 stitches an hour. Of course, this is not all stitching time as swapping threads takes time, untangling thread can take time, etc. And while the time accounts for any stitches I had to undo and redo, those aren't counted twice in the stitch count. But this at least gives us a rough idea. And as we've noted before, projects vary in terms of colors and patches of colors and such. This had several good sized chunks of colors, so those go faster since I'm not having to swap threads. For example, Minish Cap was roughly 10,000 fewer stitches, but took 19 more hours to finish. Twilight Princess was also fewer stitches than this, but also took longer. But averaging not quite two stitches a minute over 300+ hours isn't bad. Unfortunately, the framer wasn't at the store today, so I wasn't able to get frame and matte and all picked out, but I'll be out and about Thursday morning anyway, so we'll try again then. But this is done, so we can go ahead and get going on the next one.

Got my cloth for my SGDQ project last week. Took a little longer to get here than expected, but when I ordered it, I didn't catch that it was shipping from Limeyland. Nothing wrong with that, just that England's a little further away from California than say, somewhere else in the US. But we have our cloth, have all our colors and plenty of them, so tomorrow, we'll jump right in and get this going. Figure 3-4 weeks to do this, plus another two weeks for our AGDQ project, means we've got about 5-6 weeks until we start Phantom Hourglass, which means I need to decide on a design/pattern sooner rather than later. Still taking ideas, suggestions, comments, etc. on those if any of you wants to offer an opinion/any insight.

[Firehawke]

Beautiful! Congrats on the finish!