Haven’t you heard of Grossini? The one and only? The best ever magitian? Shame on you! :-) In 2006, with a group of friends (nubis, leito, lucio, tenuki, alecu, chaghi, pabloz, riq, facundobatista, yaco) we created a video game called Typus Pocus. And the main character of the video game was Grossini, a sort-of failed magitian. We had a lot of fun creating it, and created a few sequels were Grossini was, again, the main character. ...
Who remembers the Commodore 64 video game “International Tennis” ? Although it was not one of my favorites games, I enjoyed playing it. In any case, a friend of mine and a very good tennis player is moving abroad so I decided to give him a little present: Even though this looks like an “easy” embroider, the tricky part was the different pixel sizes: I used the “layers” features from Pixem, where one layer had one pixel size, and the other a smaller one. But in order to export the layers correctly I had to use some GIMP editing. ...
The challenge with the Outrun sprite is that it has multiple colors, but many islands of only a few pixels, so it requires multiple jump-stitches, or so I thought so. To prevent the jump-stitches I decided to connect the different “islands” with a run-stitch. I modified my Pixem editor to do that, and I embroidered the t-shirt. The run-stitch path is “smart”, in the sense that it will take shortest-path, but the weight is measured by color difference. This will prevent a black stitch running over a white if there is an alternative path going over brown. ...
This past weekend, I had two events: Vintage Computer Festival West, at the Computer History Museum. And we hosted a party at home. So I decided that nothing better than to embroider Le Chuck, from Monkey Island 2. These are the steps that I followed to embroider it: 1. Grab the Sprite and simplify it I took the sprite from The Legend of Monkey Island site. Original sprite has 13 different colors. ...
I’ve been asked a few times which embroidery machine. Here are the things to take into account: Budget and Hoop size The bigger the hoop size, the more expensive it gets. As en example, here are 3 Brother models: Hoop Size (in) Price Machines 4x4 ~$500 Brother Skitch, Brother SE700 5x7 ~$1000 Brother PE900 6x10 ~$2000 Brother NQ1700E It is worth noting that once you purchase a machine of a certain max hoop size, you are stuck with it. You cannot replace the hoop with a bigger one and have a bigger embroidery area. The limitation is in the mechanical arm. ...
This past Saturday (2025-07-19) I went to Open Sauce. And since this is a maker event, I went with my best t-shirt so far: the Angler Fish. But it had some issues that I wanted to fix before using it again. The two improvements that I made are: Added a pocket to place the battery and the microcontroller Improved how to attach the cables to the LED The pocket ...
First of all, if you are not familiar with Ransome the Clown, you should stop right now, and play the great video game Thimbleweed Park. Here are the steps to embroider the t-shirt: 1. Analyze and edit the sprite to embroider The first thing to do is to analyze the sprite to embroider. The original sprite has 41 colors, and using GIMP, I reduced them to 10 colors. The reasons to reduce the colors from 41 to 10 are: ...
This time the idea was to embroider the scene of the video game in two t-shirts. Each player is represented in each t-shirt. For those not familiar with Gun Fight (Arcade, 1975) this is how it looks like: So, when two people wear the two t-shirts at the same time, it looks like this: Cute, isn’t it? How it was done It was done doing something similar to what I did before with the Angler Fish. ...
Long story short, about 6 months ago I started a new hobby: machine-embroidery. Since then, I’ve been experimenting with machine-embroidery pixel-art. The Angler Fish is my 18th machine-embroidery pixel-art work. In a future post, I’ll describe in more detail how it’s been done. In the meantime, here is the summary: The design consists of: 3188 pixels 64,804 stitches Size: 223.1 x 131.1 mm (~8.78 x 5.16 in) Seven colors: six polyester threads, one metallic thread 1 blinking LED running on Lilypad Arduino board End-to-end total time: ~7 hours Image using Gemini I created the image using Gemini. Here is the Gemini session: https://g.co/gemini/share/13f7ace8b76b ...