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Sunday, March 17, 2013

Cross-Stitch Transporter Truck Pattern Tutorial

Ahh, I love my little boy.  Oops, I mean big boy, he's 4 and all now!

Have you looked in stores lately? It's soooo hard to find cute clothes for boys.  Especially when they are in toddler sizes.  I mean, really....Drake has his whole life to wear skateboard t-shirts and basketball shorts.  Don't get me wrong, he has his fair share of play clothes, but when it comes time for dressy occasions, it's just hard to find cute boy stuff.  Soon enough, he'll be wearing khaki pants and button downs, right? 

My boy is into TRUCKS.  CARS.  Anything that rolls.  So when I saw a smocked outfit with a transporter truck on it, I was in love.  I knew he would adore it:


At this point I hadn't done any smocking, so I decided to create a cross-stitch panel that I could stitch onto the front of a shirt.  Most of my projects start with some planning in the computer, so  I turned to Excel to plan out a pattern.  I started a new file, pasted this picture in, and then resized the columns and rows.  The easiest way to do this is to right click on the column/row labels (A,B,C, etc) and choose Column Width/Row Height.  I resized these to:  Column width=0.75, Row width=8



After resizing the cells, I started putting an "x" in them to create the truck.  I changed the font colors to figure out what thread to use where.  For the car wheels, I also used slashes (/ and \) to make the wheels look round.  (and stitched just half a cross-stitch in those).

From there I got to stitching...counting and re-counting to make sure I stitched in the right spots.  (I stitched on cross-stitch fabric called Aida.  You can find it at Amazon here. And if you want to cross-stitch your very own transporter truck, here you go....a PDF of the pattern.)

I bought a shirt that buttons up the back, and turned the edges of the Aida under and stitched the cross-stitch onto the shirt.  


Here he is, my handsome boy.  This is Easter 2012.  He has requested to wear it again this year, so I'm adding a yellow band to the bottom to extend the length, matching the yellow piping at the collar. 


Stay tuned for Violet's Easter dress post! (I'd better get to work!)

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