Friday, February 12, 2010

The Men of Firefly - Free Cross Stitch Patterns!

This is a corrected version of Mal. It includes the line I missed when I stitched my own Firefly cast. He's now just as tall as the rest of his crew!




Unfortunately, I don't own any fancy cross stitch pattern designing software, so we'll have to make do with hand drawn patterns. To see what the characters look like stitched up you can refer to my Firefly Character Cross Stitch.

A Note on Stitching: I generally stitch the characters on 18 count Aida cloth, and use two strands of floss for each cross stitch. Back stitching is done with just one strand. If you're going to use a larger Aida cloth, such as 14 count, I would recommend using three strands for each cross stitch. Otherwise you may see pretty big gaps between stitches.

I know most experienced cross stitchers will know what types of stitches to make to complete these patterns. If you're new to cross stitch check out this Getting Started With Cross Stitch Tutorial, which includes diagrams.

There are a lot of places where you'll see sections coloured like this, either placed horizontally or vertically. Whenever you see this make a 3/4 stitch in the dominant colour and a 1/4 stitch in the other colour to fill the square. For example, in the sample to the left Square #1 would be filled with a brown 3/4 stitch in the top left quadrant and a yellow 1/4 stitch in the bottom right quadrant. Square #2 would have a 1/4 stitch in brown in the top left quadrant and a 3/4 stitch in yellow in the bottom right quadrant. It may look a little funny at first, but once you've outlined the character in black back stitching these parts will look much smoother.

When the pattern shows two colour numbers separated by a slash, such as 729/727 this means to use one strand of each colour.

A Note on Colours: There are no hard and fast rules about what colours should be used for various characters. What I've done here is listed the colours that I used. These were mostly chosen based on what was already in my stash and what I thought would be suitable. Feel free to make changes. Have a shade of brown, but it isn't the one I used? Use your own judgement. If you think it will be work for someone's hair, pants, etc. save some money and use it rather than tracking down the exact shade I used.

A Note on Patterns: To my knowledge these patterns are correct and the colour shades used have been listed with no typos. Of course, I could be wrong. If you come across any errors or have any questions feel free to post a comment and let me know.

Most of the stitched Firefly creations I've made have writing on them. I won't be posting the alphabets as the ones I've used are copyrighted by other designers. I generally try to say where I got them from in the completed design post, but if you can't find them, there are numerous free alphabets available online and in published cross stitch books.

Enjoy and don't forget to check out my Women of Firefly patterns!

9 comments:

Andrea said...

Thank you for posting!

Carolyn McNeil said...

I see you're combining 2 passions and creating some great designs in the process...A great idea!
Happy Stitchin'...
Carolyn
http://www.stitchopedia.com
An encyclopedia of needlepoint stitches…

Deeners said...

SQUEEE!!!

AJoy said...

Thank you for posting these. I love them and have been needing new firefly project. Sqeee!

Carrie said...

A project made with your Mal.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=17110&id=100000050663068

amber said...

Hi Carrie, sorry I'm not on Facebook so I wasn't able to access your project. I'd love to see what you made though, so if you, or someone else who has a Facebook account, could repost the .jpg of your project somewhere more public that would be awesome!

Carrie said...

Sorry about that. This should be the public link of my facebook album that anyone can see.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=17110&id=100000050663068&l=8bbffe4b41

amber said...

That is very cool Carrie! I've been thinking of doing some Dr. Horrible characters, but I've been preoccupied with other projects. Thanks again for sharing!

Heather said...

You can download KG-cross stitch software for free, and it works great. Just Google kg cross stitch software to get it :) Works like a charm.