String Theorist

Inspired by this space invaders cross-stitched guitar strap, as a birthday gift for a friend who is both a physicist and a kick-ass guitar player, I embroidered String Theorist onto a guitar strap for him. Here's how it turned out:






Pretty sweet. I tried to make the letters look like flames by having the top of each letter be orange, middle yellow, and bottom white.
















To make it, we first chose a font, then took each letter of the font that appeared in the phrase String Theorist and enlarged the image of the character until it was pixelated. You can't quite see it from the image, but the guitar strap is woven into a grid, so we made the graph paper pattern the same number of boxes long and wide as the guitar strap's woven grid was. We then made an approximate pixel-to-pixel transfer of the pattern onto the graph paper, effectively scaling the image down.
















Once the pattern was on the graph paper, I copied it into the guitar strap. On the guitar strap's woven grid, I made one stitch for every box in the graph paper pattern. I only did a single stitch for each box to save time instead of a full cross stitch (which I could get away with in terms of thickness because the contrast of the floss against the strap was already pretty high). One time-saving technique I discovered along the way for working with multiple colors is: get 3 needles started at the same time with each of the colors, and swap them out instead of stopping to re-thread the same needle in each color every time you switch colors.

For materials, all I used was:

• a plain black woven guitar strap
  
• an embroidery needle
• a floss threader (basically impossible to thread the thick floss through the needle without it)
• one skein (8.7 yards or 0.5 grams) each of orange, yellow, and white floss, and I didn't even get through half of the skein

It was an under $10 project, and turned out really well. It did take 5 hours though. I really appreciate the idea of embroidery machines now.