YOSHI!

Yup, it was Yoshi.  I don't have a lot to comment about this since it actually turned out very well.  Much better than I thought it would. 1 1/2 " X 1 1/4 " inches, I like how the shine on his nose came out as well as his neck area.  The color scheme for his shoes is ugly (in the sprite AND my stitch) but it works for some reason.  Green and orange contrast pretty well though, I gotta admit. The only improvement I could use is more consistant stitching in the nose area: I still tug thethread with different strengths and it causes some visual effects if you look closely in the dark green area of his nose.  I also am not 100% happy with the neck shadow color but it still works. Overall I'm extremely happy with how this turned out.  It's so satisfying, I can't help but have this music play in my head when I look at him:

The stitch that will never be.

I'd like to introduce...Mystery-Delicious-Toast-Shaped-Thing! I started outlining this character but found I had no interest to finish it. None of my close friends would enjoy it either, so I guess I'll leave it alone indefinitely. I won't drag this guessing game out to two posts, so click on "comments" to see what it is.   I'm working on a character that is fairly familiar to most people, so look forward to that.

...Black...cat?

      Barely a square inch, This was a test stitch for me to try to stitch without changing the entire image.  I have had to edit the sprite images for most of the works up until this point, and "The Cat" was the first time I stitched an untouched sprite. It didn't turn out the way I had hoped.  There were two key problems for this one.

       First problem was I chose a bad image to even try out.  The game this little guy comes from is "Wario Land 4" on the Gameboy Advanced.  Most game sprites that originate from tiny handheld systems tend to have weird properties.  The artists like to outline all their sprites sometimes to make them stand out, or choose weird pixel placement to show shadows and depth.  But when looking at these sprites at close range , it becomes fairly messy.  If you look at the 10 X 3 block on the bottom of the cat, it's suppose to be a leg.  When artists only have a small canvas to work on, images need to be fudged a it.  It looks great on a Tiny screen, not so great blown up to a square inch. 

     Second problem was (all of you say it with me now)....COLORS!  I did not have the correct colors, so what is suppose to be shadows look more like really funky hair color.   This problem is partly due to money, I don't have $100 to spend to get 20 shades of grey/black so what I picked up was not very good at blending together well.  So in the future, don't expect to see a lot of darker color figures (Sorry Batman, maybe someday.)

     I still admire the cat a bit, It actually a stray cat in the game so it's suppose to look a little funky.  

Guess that...thing 3!

More guessing games. This one is really quick update, so I'm sorry about the length of this post. I'm a bit busier than before ever since I got my friends into playing tennis. I slept for like 2 hours after I played; I'm so out of shape.  I actually have a lot to comment about this when I'm done with it, but I'll obviously save that until the next post. For now, What is this!?

A female Elephant!

Did you know that a female elephant is called a cow? You can thank the trivia game "You Don't Know Jack" for that useless bit of information. My last guess-my-stitch was pretty easy. Almost everyone got it. I dunno, I think it could look like a pig or sheep. Congratulations! You get to see the finished product!

Original sprite:

Edit:

The piece:

Again, I ran into the problem of not having enough colors. The physical piece only took 5 colors (the tiny nose bits are the 5th). But the original sprite had at 9 I believe. There are 3 colors for the shadow effect, 2 for the brown fading, 2 for the nose, and the rest is obvious (the shadow itself is off-black). I realize that if I want greater depth in my pieces, I'll need to do the shadows but if I do not use the EXACT right color, The piece looks completely horrible. Lighting effects just look like sunburns or miscolors. It was hard to do, but I had to consolidate my colors/shadows into one, making the sprites look flat. I also found that stitching white/off-white/beige on white linen is a pain in the ass. I need good lighting to do it without messing up. You can see on the middle beige area where I was stitching while under bad lighting and "watching" a movie, haha.

Edit: yes, it is the cow from the original SNES Harvest Moon.