My mom always says she doesn’t know what to get me for christmas, so last year I told her I wanted a counted cross stitch kit. She sent me this one specifically. I had done cross stitch before and had the idea that it would be fun to stitch pixel art like game sprites. But before I embarked on that I wanted to stitch an actual kit for practice. It took a lot of time to complete and I would listen to books on tape while I stitched. I finished the project off by changing the original text to a well known rap lyric. Thanks, Mom.

I was alarmed at how long it took me to complete (I set it down for a few months). To prove to myself that I could turn something around quickly, I immediately started on a smaller project. The finale of season 6 of Futurama featured a segment that was drawn in an 8bit style. I took a promotional image from it and sliced out the Zoidberg character. I redrew the image since it had compression artifacts. I used a free online converter to generate the pattern and pick the colors. It only took an afternoon to stitch and I finished it with a popular meme because when you need a new project… why not Zoidberg? I repeated this with Bender.

It’s been fun and I’ll probably do more Futurama characters but I haven’t decided where to go from there. My mom also included the world’s simplest cross stitch pillow case that I remember working on as a kid. Four generations have failed to complete it so far… I guess I could continue the tradition. I’ll continue to upload my work to Flickr.