Huh? Who would ever make a custom cross stitch pattern from a jigsaw puzzle? Certainly nobody in their right mind would ever do anything like that would they? Well, first of all nobody ever said we were all in our right minds but that is a different story. Second of all, the patterns that are being referred to here are not literally jigsaw puzzles or even custom cross stitch patterns based on jigsaw puzzles.

            However, if you do make jigsaw puzzles, I do have some excellent photographs that you may be interested in. You can contact me about that if you want but that is not the point of this article. (And yes, that is a serious comment. Look at some of the patterns we have here and decide for yourself)

            What I am talking about are custom cross stitch patterns that are insanely difficult. A giant ball of a single color would be very difficult for a jigsaw puzzle but insanely easy for a cross stitch pattern. However, the resulting artwork may or may not be something that many people actually wanted to work on or display in their home or office. Still, have you ever seen those (masochistic?) people who do those five thousand piece jigsaw puzzles of the overview of an entire metropolitan area or other seemingly and equally impossible such pattern?

            It seems that some of our contributors actually have many photographs of that nature. (See! I told you I was serious … but again, contact me and we can discuss that separately) Now what may be really surprising is that some of them make absolutely beautiful works of cross stitch art while others I would not pay for the matches to burn … but I did not say that out loud okay? Some people will like some of them and some people will not … as is the case with many works of art in the world today. If you find one that you like, who cares whether other people like it or not. The entire point of creating custom artwork is to have something that you enjoy right?

            Still, some of these patterns can be insanely difficult to do (and we have had some of our experts refuse to do some patterns … however, more from the fact that they did not feel that they would be able to make it look as beautiful as it should or could look were one of our other experts to complete the task) so there are some things to take into consideration when creating these custom jigsaw puzzle cross stitch patterns.

            First of all you need to be certain that not all of the details are so small that they will be lost in the gaps between stitches. If there is a house somewhere, or an apartment building or any other object, people will probably want to see it in the finished cross stitch wall hanging. If it just looks like rows of single colored cross stitch thread then you may have a difficult time selling your patterns.

            Additionally, if you have more than a couple of hundred colors in your pattern, you are going to lose another big chunk of your potential customers. One way around this is to do two versions of your pattern. Create one pattern with all of the colors and create a second limiting the number of colors. Our average “Low color” cross stitch patterns are somewhere around fifty colors … which is still quite a bit when compared to many of the more traditional cross stitch patterns.

            All in all, when it comes to the photographs that you have that you think would make great jigsaw puzzle cross stitch patterns, the best thing that we can advise is to try them. I often go through ten pictures and create forty or fifty different cross stitch variations before I settle on the final product. When it comes to your taste in art, cross stitch patterns or cross stitch artwork, the only one that you should allow to be the final judge is yourself.