One of the popular genres of cross stitching these days is cross stitching family portraits, or self-portraits, or cross stitched versions of famous people or made up people or any combination of the above.
There are whole books and websites dedicated to helping people develop patterns for these kinds of projects or even to make them totally on their own. See for example the Do It Yourself Stitch People book as well as Customize Your Cross Stitch: Friends and Family.
These resources are great and offer lots of options to help you make stitched family portraits that actually look like the people (and pets!) in your family or friend group, or like your favorite famous people.
Whether you are using a book or website to help you or going it alone on your designs, one of the hardest things can be choosing the right floss for a person’s skin color. Of course this comes up with any people stitched in your projects, regardless of if they are meant to look like you or someone you know.
It’s easy to end up with a face that’s too pink or too dark, or with highlights or shadows that just look weird.
That’s where this awesome chart from Lord Libidan comes in. It includes a bunch of different sets of shades for skin tones, getting progressively darker across the chart. Each selection includes a skintone, highlight and shadow, so you can combine them to make a face that looks natural. If the people in your design have different skin tones, you can also pick one to use as your baseline and then select darker or lighter colors for the other faces as needed.
This is only a little bit of the chart shown above, so click over to Lord Libidan’s website to check out the whole range of skin tones matched with DMC colors.
[Photo: Lord Libidan]
