You may have noticed, since I first released my connect-the-dots stitch sets in December I haven’t really been mentioning them – well that’s because I’ve been working on a major format update for the last month!  (Oh yeah, I actually did mention them back here, but I said I’d be blogging about it later, so now is later!)  The sets are now being printed by Spoonflower, so the fabric and the printing are both higher quality than my original home inkjet printed numbers onto thin recycled fabric.

The regular sets are linen/cotton blend canvas, in assorted colors, and are now 6×6 inch squares, which means you must use a 5″ embroidery hoop.  The pictures themselves are 4×6 inches or smaller, so they can be framed in standard 4×6 frames if you want.  The fabric has a great, subtle texture, as you can see in the close-up shots; it’s thick and sturdy, and if you want to wash it that will soften it up a bit.

I seem to like these yellowy-green shades for my example stitching, but they are semi-rare in my color assortments – the most common color types are light neutrals, blues, and yellow/oranges, with a fair amount of pinks, light purples, and greens.  If you order a set and want certain colors, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.  (I could make sets in a certain color genre, like neutrals, or shades of blue, but I can’t get too specific with what I have in stock.)

The matted sets are pretty much the same as the original kind, since the Spoonflower fabric used for them is the quilting weight cotton, which is about the same thickness as the recycled fabric I was using, but with higher quality printed numbers.  The update with the matted sets is that I now have 6 fabric pattern options to choose from, at the bottom of the page.

A couple other minor changes from when I first released them… I no longer offer pdfs of the sets.  They weren’t popular, so I’m thinking about saving them up for a future connect-the-dots ebook perhaps… not really sure yet though.  And, I used to have the total number counts in the corners (as you can see here) but I changed my mind, thinking it’s not useful enough and it looks bad up there, so those are gone now.

So now I have the 4 different sets: Cryptozoology, Craft Tools, Woodland Creatures, and Dinosaurs – each with 5 pictures total, 1 shown as the example, and 4 remaining a mystery (unless you want to spoil it).  The example images are generally the ones that are most obvious in dot-form, so the other 4 are more mysterious.  Most of the sets have a range of difficulty levels, meaning some of the pictures have fewer numbers for simpler shapes, and some have many more numbers for more complex shapes, which I think are the most fun!

Ok I think that’s all the info I’ve got… now that the format is all figured out, I’m excited to make more sets!  (some I have planned for the future include: musical instruments, cameras, sea creatures, something food-y…..)

Oh yeah one last thing, just want to give a big thanks to Evil Mad Scientist Lenore, who first brainstormed the idea of having the sets printed by someone like Spoonflower, over beers at Kennedy School when meeting up turned to crafty shop-talk, as it often does!