I Turn Nasa Photographs Into Needlepoint Tapestries

I love cross-stitching. It's meditative and soothing and challenging all at the same time.Yet, about 5 years ago I realized that if I stitched another butterfly I was going to scream - and what I really wanted was a tapestry of my wedding tattoo (a depiction of a gravity well, or what happens when two galaxies collide - but that's a story for another post).

Even barring that specific desire, patterns for geeks are thin on the ground. And certainly not very many that allow us to stitch the stars. So I make my own. 4 tapestries later (and counting), I've found one way to, as one fellow artist put it, "make the infinite, intimate".

I use basic computer software to give me a starting plan, and invariably I have to adjust the colors or tweak this or that stitch. In every piece I have needed to tweed colors (using two different colors of thread in the same needle) in order to produce a shade that the thread manufacturers don't make, and there's always at least one thread color the software has included that doesn't make sense to me. Each tapestry takes at least a thousand hours of work or more.

More info: geekyprettythings.com

This Spitzer-telescope close-up of a nebula nestled in the Pleiades almost broke me. It took me (as far as I can tell) nearly 1600 hours, contains over 90 different colors of thread, and is 37,400 stitches. I was so obsessed while working on this I would spend 6-8 hours stitching, go to sleep for 2 hours, then wake up and stitch again.

So, so, worth it.

This is the first one I created; I used 55 different colors and it's about 29,000 stitches (there's a lot of unstitched space in the corners).

From a Cassini mission photograph, this uses 17 different shades of grey plus white, black, navy and a smattering of avacado green and black/brown.

The large moon is Rhea, the small dot below it is Epimethius, and they are both in front of Saturn's rings. The slanting lines at the bottom are the shadows of the rings on the planet's surface.

I love this galaxy. It's a collection of superlatives, really - it's super-big (37,000 light years across), we can see 11 million years into the past just by looking at this thing, it's got a super-massive black hole at the center of it, it's super-energetic so it keep throwing out super novas, and it's got a super-interesting "unknown object" within it that the scientists are still puzzling out. That, and it's just so freaking pretty. Also, the source photo for this was given to me personally by one of the scientists (Dr. Johnathan McDowell) who works at the Chandra lab - which is where one layer of this photo was taken. So it's pretty special in that regard, too.

I stitched a crystal cube and glass beads for the major stars, like I did in Helix.