Some new Cross-Stitching

Inspiration: For my job, I work as a Salesforce Administrator (not for the company Salesforce).  I love learning via the Trailhead platform and may be a little obsessed with the Salesforce characters.  A few months ago someone posted a pixelated image of the rainbow unicorn Astro.  At the time, I posted a reply stating that this would make a great cross-stitch project.  However, since I was working on other things I really didn't give much though to doing it myself.  I went back to making some felt cute characters (that I'll show in a later post).  In a post I made of one of those cute felt characters, someone shared a link to blog that included a crocheted Codey that was pretty cute.  I took a look at the post and the instructions included an image that I could easily use to cross stitch, so I did.  The author also had a post for a crocheted Astro.  I used that one too.  Then feeling like I had to do Cloudy (since Astro is central but Codey represents developers and Cloudy represents Admins, I couldn't just do one and not the other). So that brought me to making a cross-stitched Cloudy too.

How I Made Them: For Codey, I used the pattern provided in this blog post.  I found DMC floss in colors close to what the author described (sorry I didn't write them down but I think they were Black, 801 for the Dark Brown, and 436 for the Light Brown).  I used 14 count White Aida cloth and used the fold-over before stitching method for the edges.  I used White DMC Floss to fill in the rest.

For Astro, I started from the pattern provided in this blog post.  I didn't feel like make Astro's costume in the dark colors the author posted was correct so I went with a lighter tan and then modified the ears to make the insides dark more like the Plush versions of the character I have at home.  So for colors I used DMC flosses of Black, Ecru (skin), 436 for the lighter brown, and 433 for the dark brown in the ears.  I used 14 count White Aida cloth and used the fold-over before stitching method for the edges.  I used White DMC Floss to fill in the rest.

For Cloudy, I didn't have a pattern to start from so I had to make one.  I found an image of Cloudy I like on Google and then used LunaPic to crop it and used the Lego effect to get it closer to a grid-based image with colors.  I then drafted out what I was going to do on graph paper and set to work on it.  For colors, I used the following DMC Floss: White, Black, 436 for the brown horns, 605 for the mouth, 3072 for the grey, and 801 with only a half-stitch to create a sky-like background to make Cloudy's white fur pop a little more.  I used 14 count White Aida cloth and used the fold-over before stitching method for the edges.

Other Ideas:

I definitely still want to do some of the other Salesforce characters like Appy and Earnie.  Also the blog I used for patterns above also had one for the Trailhead Logo that might be fun to do.  And of course, that original Twitter post that inspired this still needs to be cross-stitched.