How we design

Most cross stitch patterns sold today are computer generated. That process is quick and easy by the automatic use of computers, but unfortunately gives a poor result

DMC (and others) have up to a few hundred different floss colors available. Pictures often consist of millions of colors.

If there are one hundred shades of blue in a picture (not rareat all if you look at the pixels in the picture),the computer might have ten different blue floss shades to choose from in the translation and it has no way of knowing which pixels are important in the picture and which ones it can ignore.

Most computer-generated patterns look very different from the source pictures and the finished piece often looks flat and loses all its natural glow and beauty.

Golden Kite Designs

First of all, we are very careful when we select the images we want to work with. For each pattern you see in our shop, we have selected that motif out of hundreds of other.

Then we prepare the picture by enhancing colors and shades and retouching it to get a clean source.

Next step is to analyze the colors. This step is made by hand. We select the important parts in the source and create the necessary colors. Yes, we create colors! We are not restricted to the few hundred colors available as floss colors.

Blended Colors

By blending colors we get almost an infinite number of color shades to work with in our designs. Blending means that when you do the stitching you take one strand of a certain color and one strand of another color and use together for certain stitches. This technique gives (when using DMC floss) about 160.000 shades for us to use instead of the 400 available as pure colors.

Solids-Only patterns

We also offer patterns made of solid DMC colors only without the blends. This makes them perfect for Petit Point stitching (half cross stitches) when using one thread only or for ordinary cross stitch with one, two or more threads.
These patterns are typically quicker and a bit easier to work.