Hi! I'm pinkythepink, also known as Ashley Mae, I run Make it Pink (cross stitch designs). I've been doing cross stitching for something like 25 years now. I've been designing for I think 15.
I'm not a fan of the video format. I'm really nervous. I don't know how this is going to turn out. I don't want to do a ton of editing for it so I'm really sorry about all the "um"s and "ah"s that are going to occur. I've been thinking about YouTube videos, and trying to do this, for the solid part of two months, and probably a bit longer than that if I'm honest with myself. I'm the kind of person that rambles and, you know, it takes me hours to write a newsletter and I reread it over and over and I tweak it and sometimes typos still make it through. And while I'm comfortable with that format, and I like writing and editing in that way, I'm not looking forward to it for videos.
I got an email from Wix (which is my webhost for makeitpink.net) that said the cost to renew the newsletters basically was coming up and it was a lot more money than I wanted to spend on newsletters. I fully believe in the newsletters - I feel like that's a great way to reach people. I, myself, check my email, [it's the] first thing that I do when I wake up. I go through all my emails and so it just makes sense to me (and the way I do things) that other people would also want newsletters. But then this most recent newsletter that went out was, you know, people who wanted it didn't get it. People who were signed up for newsletters said that they hadn't got one in a long time. People that were getting them were actually getting them into their spam folder. So, that was really frustrating. And then on top of it they wanted to charge me a lot of money to continue sending newsletters and I said, "Well, maybe newsletters have to go on a break for a while. And maybe now is the perfect push to put me on to video format. Yay!"
To kind kind of structure myself, I made - that's what I keep looking [at] over here - is I have a handwritten list of the questions from Facebook. I had put out a post I think it was in November asking people what questions I should answer in the introduction.
Tamara and a couple other people had asked how did I start cross stitching? I was in fifth grade and I was a very angry child. My mom said that I should be productive instead of destructive. Instead of putting all of that rage and frustration into beating up on my brother and generally being a brat and not being a good kid, I could be creative and put all that energy into stabbing small pieces of fabric for several hours on end. So, that's great! It worked out so good for everybody! I think the world's a better place because I cross stitch.
I started [with], they were just some little kits, I think probably from Walmart. The first one was a purple flower and I think it was literally like a two color kind of kit thing. Like a Learn How To Do A Craft kit. It was just four purple flower petals with a yellow middle and it knotted on the back while I was trying to pull the thread through. I got mad at it and I put it in the trash. Which was extremely typical of my actions back then. Mom fished it out of the trash and she brought it back to me and we un-knotted the thread. You know, she taught me patience with it.
The second pattern was a cat face, I think - my memory was that it was an orange tabby. And that pattern had backstitching on it. I had gone through and done all of the regular cross stitching and then I just - I could not figure out the backstitching. And again, I got very frustrated. I wanted to throw it away. I didn't want it anymore. And then mom came over and helped me. I think she might have done all of the backstitch on that cat face.
So, how did all of that evolve into patterns? was the other question that Tamara asked. When I moved to Arizona I was 13 and we went to Michaels and they had (and they still have) an extremely small cross stitch section. The patterns in that cross stitch section from when I moved there in 2005... I think are the same patterns that you can find there now. Like, they do not update that area. But they had, you know, a CD ROM Project Box and it was HobbyWare's Pattern Maker. And the whole thing was that you could put photos into it and hit the little, you know, convert button and it would spit out a pattern based on your photo. When I had first emailed Hannah Alexander, which I want to say was 2010 it might have been 2011 [it was 2015], when I got permission from her to turn some of her pieces into patterns, I ran them through like I had anything else. Which was just to convert it, you know, to pixels, and I wasn't happy with it. I remember thinking like, "I wouldn't stitch this," and I really wanted to make something that I would stitch. So, I went back through, and at that time I was still using the basic version of HobbyWare's Pattern Maker. The way I did it then was I converted her artwork into just the pixels, and then I would switch and do all of the backstitching outlines, and then by hand go through and try to clean up all that pixelization. And, like, smooth it down, so [that] it wasn't so popcorn'd.
At that time I was also still talking to and working with Magical525. She helped me do a lot of that first color picking, color correction. She really encouraged me to do the dithering which is, like, those checker boards between [colors]. And she encouraged me to do blends. All super good, super foundational ideas. That worked out really well. But gosh! It took ages. It took so long. Every time we had to change a color I had to go through and manually find all of those little stitch markers, you know, the pixels, and change them. It was just such a slow process. Any time that I could get away with not changing a color I would do my best. And then, once I upgraded to the Pro Version, it has a color replacement button. So you can just highlight a color and say, "Hey... can you... change this blue into pink?" And it just will! It'll just do it! And that's also where you see the transformation in the pattern progress like from this pixel-y blob thing to the really bright color mapping colors that are just, like, wild - don't match the artwork at all. They're just placeholder colors so that then I can go through and replace them with the actual colors once they're picked.
April asked how did I make this a lucrative business? and with all my authenticity... this is not a lucrative business. I wish I could tell you that this is completely viable and I'm fine and everything's okay, but the truth of it is that I could not do this without the support and funds of someone else. Up until last year that was my mom. I lived with my mom. I did, you know, I work hard - I certainly put out a lot of art - but it's... that's not paying a lot of bills. I'm doing it because I love it and because I had the privilege of being able to do it. Not everyone can, you know, live with their mom and be supported fully like that. And I think part of it is, you know, my mom wanted to be an artist and my grandma... my grandma did not see the value in that. I think part of it was my mom kind of wanted to encourage and support it as much as she could and kind of live out her dream of being a stay-at-home artist that her mom didn't let her have.
Now I live with my boyfriend. We did a big move, I went from Arizona to Pennsylvania. And now he works and supports my art stuff. It's not lucrative but certainly it is still very important to me. And not just as an enrichment thing but to our little household, and making sure the cats get fed, making sure I get fed. I don't have proper words for how extremely grateful I am that people like my work and want to buy it. I got super emotional over the holidays. People were putting my stuff on like their Christmas wishlist. And I sold a couple gift cards where people were buying it, you know, for other people. And it's very cool. It's very nice. I feel very accomplished even if it's not lucrative. I'm very happy doing what I'm doing.
April's next question was do I pre-stitch every pattern? And the answer to that is a very easy no. My patterns are super huge! All those details and the little beads and everything... so, no, I do not pre-stitch patterns. I remember when I very first started I had posted on DeviantArt, you know, should I make a pattern that takes me 40 hours to make and then pre-stitch it, which is going to take me another 150 to 200 hours to stitch and then release it? It didn't seem viable. I know how cross stitch works. I've been doing this almost my whole life. I know how the threads blend. I know how these things come together. When I was still working with Magical525 she did test stitch some of the blends for me and made sure, you know, the transitions were clean.
I've done a couple of miscellaneous test stitching, usually on the freebies because those are smaller. But like, Krystal and I worked on the Enchantress before she released. A couple people worked on the Stained Glass Rose before that released. My little cross stitch group of Krystal, Nancy, Carla, and Leonore have very frequently gone through and, you know, made sure the colors looked good. Made sure symbols are readable. And there's been occasions where I do test stitch, like, very small sections. Like when [Sailor] Pluto had the velvet in her ribbon, I test stitched that. When I was doing with stuff with Frenone she was worried about the different back stitching weights in the eyes, I think was specifically. So like, I had stitched part of Jaina's face to to have a visual for Frenone so that she could see how it looked like when it was stitched. You know, there's been random occasions like that, but for the most part, no, I'm not pre-stitching things.
April's next question is Etsy still a good platform? Um... I don't think so. I think it's a good platform for when you're starting. I started on Etsy and it was very... I didn't really work with Etsy the way Etsy wanted to work. Because I was doing limited edition (signed things) and I didn't trust Etsy to not give people access to the old editions every time I would make a sale I would then not relist it as the same listing. I would make a new listing. So like, let's say you bought Merida 21/50. That one sale, right, that Etsy link with like its listing number and stuff, would then go in the trash. And I would make a whole brand new listing for Merida 22/50. So it made it really hard for people to add stuff to, like, their favorites, or their collections. It made it hard for people to keep track of me. It made it hard for Etsy to promote stuff because it couldn't say, like, "Oh, this is a best seller item," or, "This is a popular item," you know. It couldn't do any of that stuff with me because I continuously was recycling the listings, because I didn't trust them to keep the files in order. Even with all my nonsense I did pretty good on Etsy at the beginning.
2019, I want to say, they changed the way their ads worked. It was like if you made a certain amount of sales then you could not turn off Etsy ads. The Etsy ads were fairly expensive percentage-wise out of your sales. And I already work on a pretty small margin. Not only is this not a lucrative business, right, but I give a percentage to Hannah. And at that time I was giving a percentage of fees and stuff to Etsy. (And not just Hannah, but any artist that I'm working with, right, I'm giving them a percentage of the sales.) And then I'm putting aside a percentage for taxes. Then whatever is left over is the "profit" and that, you know, generally, that's going right back into the business anyway. Where I'm buying fabric, or I'm buying thread, or I'm buying, you know, supplies. And just generally my time, you know. And Etsy when they said, you know, "you're not allowed to turn off these ads," took an even larger chunk on top of everything else. And I said this is really, you know, unaffordable. And the goal - I wasn't seeing my boyfriend at that time - my goal was just to... so that Mom didn't have to support me on everything. That I could pay my own bills. And it became very just undoable for me.
I think around the same time is when they introduced the Star Seller thing. I buy things on Etsy just as a customer, the same way as I'm selling things on Etsy. You know, I would buy something, and then the shop that I would buy something from would send me, like, a promo[tional] email. I, as the shop, would get dinged for not responding fast enough. And it was like... well... this isn't a customer. They put in all of their ads that they'd like to keep art human, but they are very open to AI stuff. I don't know if you guys have seen the AI embroidery patterns, but like, it's not a - it's not a great look.
I stand by that it's still a good place to start. Having access to that marketplace when no one knows who you are is a wonderful thing. If you already have a large following, like, somewhere else, you think that they would want to buy your things, see about getting (if you can afford to) your own website or your own - I think it's a Shopify thing -I've never used Shopify. Like I said, I use Wix as my webhost and the reason for that is mainly because they own DeviantArt. I'm a Community Volunteer for DeviantArt and it's all tied together. It's all one happy big ecosystem. Wix is expensive but because that ecosystem is all tied in together I feel it's worth it. And if you can afford Etsy's fees by all means, it's a good avenue. It's just not a good long-term avenue, I think.
Oh, it goes into April's next question, what platforms would I recommend? I'm a huge fan of DeviantArt's Artisan Craft community. And I say that not just as the Community Volunteer for Artisan Crafts but I just, I think it's the best place on the internet to have an artisan craft gallery. I've looked into other art specific sites like ArtStation, they're just not very friendly to physical media in the way that artisan crafts are. If you're doing 3D modeling - most of those art sites are fine with you. If you're doing digital art - they're all about it. If you're making, like, charms and stickers - it seems to work out pretty good. But if you're doing like needlecraft, or cosplay, or costume work, generally if you're making clothing, if you're knitting, if you're crocheting, needle tatting, if you're making rugs, latch hook, punch needle, on and on and on - these kinds of 3D space, textile, tactile, you can touch it and work with it, mixed media at times - these things don't have a better place on the internet for a gallery than DeviantArt does. And I know DeviantArt has its reputation on the internet for various reasons! But my artisan craft bubble is, like, really nice. It's a really nice, wholesome place to be. The community has kind of dropped off over time just as social media itself has grown.
As the Community Volunteer for Artisan Crafts I also run the Community Relations Artisan Craft Group which is currently going through a bit of a revitalization. There's going to be lots of, like, events. And not so much contests, but like challenges. I think we have a Valentine's one coming up, which would make sense for February. We have a crossover thing happening with the Cosplay Group because cosplay goes very well into Artisan Crafts. We're supposed to have some crossover events with the Photography Groups because making physical media requires cameras if you're going to show it online. All in effort to build community around it.
While my Facebook group, which is very specifically for my patterns, I feel like it's a very good community of people. (My undying gratitude for my customers that also want to interact with me on Facebook! It's so nice!) That Facebook group is also quite reliant on people logging into Facebook and seeing it. I never just open Facebook.com. I always open the Make it Pink Group. It's always the page that I look at. Obviously it's, you know, it's my page - I'm involved with it.
Instagram is pretty unusable for me. Instagram was never really my thing but at least it would cross post to Facebook. And now it cross posts to Threads. I think Threads is really nice. It's like how, apparently, how Twitter used to be? I've also seen people comment about how it feels very Tumblr. I've had a lot of posts come across where people are saying it's, like, a lot like MySpace. That's my... that's my knowledge there.
I've recently joined the - it's Creepy Cross-Stitch Collective. They share my sentiment in, like, the algorithms and the social media spheres not doing so great for people that create slowly or people who don't want to create video content (like myself). And the the idea is kind of to go back to almost how the internet used to behave, where you'd have a list of curated people all together at once. Kind of recommending each other, in a way.
Gabby asks how do I coordinate with Mom before and after moving? So, if you didn't know already, Mom helps me do all of my color checking. I call it "color checking" because of the previously explained way I used to do it. Where I would pick the colors as close as possible and then go through and color correct it. Now it's less of a "color check" and more of a "color pick" but the old name has stayed. I've got these DMC color cards, like this, and this is the real thread version and not the printed version. Oh, the camera doesn't, like, autofocus, how annoying. All the real thread samples are organized like this, in colors, and that makes it easier to pick things and do blends and whatnot. I have a Kreinik color circle with all of its various glitters similarly organized by color. And then here are all of the color boxes, and that's organized by number. When I moved I made a duplicate set for Mom so she also has all of the colors by number.
Imagine you can see more of this, I've got like an L-shaped desk happening. And Mom would sit there with her own desk with all of the boxes of colors open and her copy of the color palette. She would almost have like an L setup as well. She can see my computer monitor, and I would highlight like a section of the hair, and I'd say, "Okay, so like, we need five colors for hair - or there's five symbols for hair. We need to pick three solids. The two symbols between will be blends. So we need to pick three colors that are going to mesh together and match the artwork." So, she's using her own iPad now. I would display the artwork on the iPad because it has the brightest truest colors and she would get that. And then my art monitor is the truest brightest colors. They're still a little different, right? My monitor and the iPad - still not 100% the same. She would, you know, then pick those colors that I've asked her to pick. And then I would hold them up against my version of the artwork over here and we'd go back and forth. Unsurprisingly, I tend to lean a bit pink in my color choices. Mom tends to lean a bit blue in her color choices. And so we argue with each other until everything looks as close as possible to the original artwork as we can.
When we were doing it in person like that it was much easier for me to keep track of how long that took and be able to add those hours to the final time of creation. But now that I'm moved, she still has that desk setup thing in Arizona, and now I'm here in Pennsylvania with my desk setup. We use an app called Marco Polo which is basically like video phone messages. She can view them whenever she is able to because we have a time difference now. I don't have to, like, wake her up and say, "Hey! We're doing colors!" She can just look at the video whenever she wants. And what I do is I record my screen and I really slowly I go through all of the colors that we need to pick. I've been making what I'm calling Dot Maps, which is where I'm taking the isolated colors and I'm making big dots of those colors in MSpaint next to the original artwork. And I'm labeling all of it like, she has, you know, the five colors in her hair, so it'll be S1, B1, S2, B2, and then S3 for solids and blends. And those will be big dots on the MSpaint. Then I send all of this - the video, and the files, and all of this to mom, via Dropbox. I taught her how to use that so she can open those up and see those.
Then between her iPad and her phone and all of the lamps that I left with her - I think when I was with her in person we had like seven lamps at the same time with this bright white light like this to, again, to keep the colors as crisp and as authentic as possible. So, she's got a bunch of lamps there and I've got new lamps that I bought for here. She'll pick out all those colors from the video and then she'll send me a video back. I pick out all of those colors and I lay them out and I, you know, make changes or corrections. And then I send her a video back, and then she makes those changes that I wanted. And, you know, we'll go back and forth until it's right. After all those colors are picked then of course I have to go through and do all my symbols and clean up and everything, but Mom helps me with colors. Bless her for helping me with colors because without her all of our patterns would be pinker. As much as that would make me happy, it would not be as true to the artwork as we could get it. Thank you Mom for all of your work and help. You make my patterns so much better.
So Maria asked how did I meet and partner with Hannah? The answer to that is DeviantArt. I followed her as an artist for quite a while and she was doing, and she does, cosplay design. So, you know, when she would post a design like Belle she would say what kind of fabric is going to drape and the reason she picked the stuff that she did in those design elements. And what type of beads or what type of crystals that she would recommend. If things would be metallic those were generally involved in her artist notes as well as cosplay designs. I still have never stitched one of my own Hannah designs, it's making me crazy. I really wanted to stitch them. I was... I looked at them and I said that I can't do cosplay -- or I don't do cosplay, not that I can't. I'm sure I could if I wanted, but I don't want to. I'd love to see this dress in all of its glittery metallics and the... all of it. I want to see it. But I don't have access to that. But what I do have access to is embroidery. And so I messaged Hannah on DeviantArt and I said, you know, "I'd like to convert your artwork into patterns." At that time because of the way I converted things into the pixels, as I talked about earlier, I needed versions of her art without the watermarks because when you convert into pixels like that the watermarks also become pixelated. So I needed versions without them so that when I converted them those blobs would not exist. And so, she gave me access to the first three which are Merida, Rapunzel, and Belle.
Again, as I told earlier, I was unhappy with the pixelization and I went through the whole relearning / reteaching myself process. When I went back to ask her for more she said, "No." I was really upset about it. A while later she messaged me and had a change of heart on it. I sat at my desk and I cried. And I called my mom and I cried, you know, on the phone to her, and I said, "You know, this is a life changing thing. She's going to let me work with her art."
We agreed on the limited edition thing. Originally, right, we had 50 sets and we had 50 solos. Once they were gone, they were gone, you know, there was a 100 copies of a design meant to go out, ever. It took four years for the first pattern to sell out and that was Merida. The moment she sold out a bunch of people posted and were mad that it sold out. And I was like, "What? You guys have had so long to buy this pattern if you wanted it." And it's it's always been known that they're limited edition. I guess enough people must have messaged Hannah upset about it. She messaged me and was like let's, you know, let's release more. That's how we ended up with the current system for the older patterns where another set of 50 will release at the higher - first without signatures - and then slowly the price goes up. And with the price going up Hannah then gets more money sent her way. The idea is that people who bought it early or maybe had a sense of FOMO won't feel cheated out, I suppose, for people who came later.
They're really, really big projects. There's definitely a sense for me that if people can't afford the pattern they might have difficulty getting all of the supplies together. Because the materials, right, there's a lot of colors and DMC thread went up in price. There's a lot of skeins that you gotta buy and some of them require multiple skeins. And the Kreinik thread is not cheap. Getting a spool of Kreinik is, it's a lot. The beads can be a lot. Some of them have specialty materials for finishing, those can cost extra. It, that, the price of my patterns is high and I acknowledge that. I'm aware of it. It's a luxury art. Cross stitch can absolutely be an affordable thing, you know, I've been working on it since I was really little. You can get kits at, you know, Walmart. I think you can get whole kits for less than some of my patterns cost. It's been a long time since I've been into a physical store to look at patterns because like I said, I think Michaels still sells the same patterns as when I - in 2005 - when I moved to Arizona. You know, I do still go in physically to pick up thread, but most patterns I buy are are digital anymore. They're from Etsy sellers. They're from people who have individual stores.
Maria's other question [that] she asked, which pattern is my favorite? I've actually have been thinking about this for a bit because I don't want to just pick based on, like, my favorite character, but I mean that... that's the the truth. Belle in her winter outfit is my favorite design. It's my favorite pattern that I've done. I feel like I went quite extra on it, not just because she's my favorite character. I really liked putting in the extra option of like the the fuzzy stuff for her wintry themed things. That came up again in some of the Avatar patterns. I really liked - I bought some extra like it's a, faux fur trim, that once she's stitched I can shape and put on her to give her like that much more dimension. My favorite designer, Mirabilia, some of her older designs have roses that don't require backstitching and I had gone through and really, like, studied how those were put together. And [I] put those in the center panel of her dress instead of trying to one-for-one replicate it from Hannah's art. Being able to do the different background layers, I believe the Winter Bell has three different background stages. One with a foreground branch that when I took out and reworked the dress, you know, where the, where that branch had intersected, I felt really good about that. So that one's easy my favorite.
Outside of the Hannah designs I think Just Call Me Cat's Ostara would be a very easy second place. She's so pretty! And that was one that I got to stitch myself to like, almost prove the concept of how the Kreinik glitter was going to go on top. And photographing glitter is tough! But I was really, really pleased with how that had come together. And all of her back stitching, the way that she sparkles, all the beads, and her flower crown, and her hair. The Kreinik halo around her whole body. Like, it turned out really nice. I'm really, really happy with that one.
I think that covers an intro video. I hope if you made it this far that you don't mind my rambling so much and that you had, you know, that you learned something, and that you enjoyed it, and that this was nice. I'm going to try to do more of this. I don't know how well I'll keep up with it, it took a lot of energy today to sit down and make myself do this. And it's not that I don't, you know, want to answer these questions, or that I don't want to communicate. It's just I would have rather put this in writing.
I plan to do videos that are kind of reviewing my patterns. I'd like to review some stuff that I've stitched by other people. I'd like to go over more of my process, not necessarily in a tutorial way, but, like, so that people can kind of see what I'm doing when I'm making patterns. There is a tutorial that I would would like to do, Hannah Alexander's Mario Bouquet. I planned to do this and then I ended up moving. I wanted to just make it almost like a really in-depth, almost like a book, type of tutorial. It quickly got away from me and so I thought, well, if I'm going to be doing YouTube stuff anyway, maybe I can also make that into a tutorial video. To go along with the written PDF because certainly writing things makes me happier.
Thank you all for your support. Thank you for sticking with me through this. Thank you for helping me take care of my cats and myself. It means more to me than I can, than I can put in words. And thank you to my mom for making all this possible and continuing to help me today. It's really, really cool.
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