The Stitch Is the Smallest Unit

The Stitch Is the Smallest Unit

What this makes

Hand it a photograph and it comes back stitched — every colour a whole thread from a count you set, every shape built out of stitches that lie in a direction, and the fabric showing between them. Two fields.

You are given ONE photograph. Return ONE image: that photograph worked in thread on cloth. Follow every line. Replace only the FIELDS block; everything after it is fixed.

First — do you have the photograph and the fields?

Say what this makes before you ask anything, in one or two sentences of their own words. Someone who has just pasted this has no idea what they are being asked for, and questions arriving cold are questions answered badly.

If no photograph is attached, stop and ask for one. This works a particular picture in thread; there is nothing to stitch without it.

If either field below still has braces around it, stop and ask. Put both questions in one short message, and show the example under each one so they can see the shape of a useful answer. Wait for the replies, then work. Never fill a brace yourself.

Ask in whatever language they are writing to you in. Translate the questions and the examples; do not make someone read English to tell you what they want.

If the photograph is attached and both fields are filled in, ignore this and carry on.

Fields — replace these two lines only

• How many thread colours, and the ground they are worked on: {a count, and a cloth}
• How big a stitch is, measured against something in the picture: {a count of stitches across a named thing}

The law everything else follows from

Everything about how the subject is drawn may change. Nothing about what is in it may.

The rendering becomes thread on cloth. What is in the picture does not move: same subject, same pose, same arrangement, same framing, same number of things, same relative sizes. It is that photograph, stitched.

A stitch is whole, and so is its colour

This is the whole rewrite, and it is one fact about thread.

A stitch is a length of one thread. It is that colour along its whole length and it cannot be part of another. There is no mixing, no fading and no half-stitch anywhere in the picture.

• Every colour in the result is one of the threads the first field counts. Not a shade between two of them. Count them: if there are more distinct colours than the field allows, the picture has been painted.
• Shading is done by alternating whole stitches of two threads over a small area, so the eye mixes them. Up close you can see which stitch is which.
• Two colours meet stitch against stitch, along a stepped line. They never fade into one another.
• A curve is a staircase. A stitch cannot be a fraction of a stitch, so every curved edge in the picture is a series of steps at the stitch size.

If any part of the result has a smooth gradient in it, no thread was involved.

Every stitch lies in a direction

• Stitches are laid in rows or ranks, and each rank runs in one direction.
• The direction follows the form: along a feather, around a cheek, down a stem, across a sky. It changes where the form changes, and the change is visible as a seam between two ranks.
• The direction is what catches the light. Two areas of the same thread stitched in different directions look like two different values, and that is a legitimate way to shade.
• Never one direction across the whole picture, and never random.

The cloth is present

• The ground the first field names shows between and around the stitches — at the edges of every worked area, and as the background wherever nothing is worked.
• The cloth has its own weave and colour, and the thread sits on top of it with a little height.
• Stitches have body. Each catches light along its length and throws a small shadow onto the cloth, all in one direction.
• Not every part of the picture must be worked. Bare cloth is a legitimate background.

What a needle cannot do

• Nothing smaller than a stitch exists. Whiskers, eyelashes, lettering, a highlight in an eye — each is one stitch of one colour or it is not there.
• Small features become their own small shape in the nearest available thread.
• Texture becomes stitch direction, not detail. Fur is ranks of stitches lying the way the fur lies.
• The count of things stays right. Detail may go; objects may not.

Never

• Text, numerals, a signature, a caption or a watermark anywhere, in any script.
• Gradients, blur, airbrush, soft shadows or a colour between two threads.
• A hoop, a needle, a hand, a craft table, a frame or a mock-up.
• A printed photographic texture under the stitches.
• A subject the photograph did not contain.

What it should read as

A worked panel somebody would turn over to look at the back of — thread you could count, on cloth you can see.