[Cross Stitch] A not-so-heavenly design - or, what happens when you ignore customer feedback for two years

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

Background: Cross stitching is a hobby that I’m sure many of you are familiar with, but if you’re not, it’s the art of making tiny little crosses in fabric to create a pretty picture. Cross stitching has many different styles, from the more traditional to the less traditional.

As with any crafting hobby, there tend to be multitudes of mini ongoing dramas (is DMC really the best thread maker around, it is rude to cross stitch swear words, is it cultural appropriation to stitch sugar skulls, is it disrespectful to stitch Jesus smoking a joint, why do metallic threads exist anyway), but this situation has blown up in the past few weeks and it’s quite significant in terms of fallout, both monetarily and time-wise.

Heaven and Earth Designs (HAED)

One popular type of cross stitch is full coverage - that is, that you cannot see any of the fabric under the thread, there are no gaps. These can get pretty intense. In the cross-stitching world, HAED is the Ultimate Provider of Full Coverage Cross-Stitch designs. Here’s an example of one being stitched up. They take years to create and are intense labours of love.

The reason HAED is so popular is that they purchase a license to produce cross stitch charts of copyrighted artwork. Again, like in many other crafts, copyright breaking pattern designers run rampant and stitchers tend not to want to give those people their money. Additionally, the owner of HAED has in the past claimed that she hand charts her patterns herself, spending anywhere between 4-40 hours per chart - that sort of quality is invaluable in a world full of people making a quick buck by scanning a picture they found on google through a pattern converter software and flogging it on etsy.

As they purchase a license for the art, HAED patterns get expensive. Kits cost around $200, and the cost inflates depending on what fabric you want to use and how many colours (and subsequently how many skeins of floss) you have to buy. Looking at one I was previously planning on purchasing, it would set me back about $400 total - plus the other tools that you’d use when stitching something this size. Not insignificant.

Floss, Chart Design and some Colour Theory

As I said above, DMC is widely considered to be the premier floss producer (maybe Anchor is you’re European). Most kits come with DMC thread included, most independent charters will use DMC, they are by far the dominant force in embroidery circles. This is for good reason - their quality control is exceptional, they give a lovely finish, they feel nice to stitch with and they’re available in all good craft stores.

When you’re stitching up a large piece, you use lots of different colours to give the piece depth, texture, and importantly, gradient. This means that while you may not know why you need twelve different shades of blue for a small area, it turns out when you stitch it up the detail is fantastic. However, obviously DMC cannot create a colour for every conceivable colour in existence - currently, there are 500 options, which while a lot still means that when pattern makers create designs from existing art, there is some adjustment needed to be made.

Back in 2018, DMC launched 35 new colours to their range to fill in gaps where there currently isn’t a good colour option, and to help with transition shades - this doesn’t happen often, so it was a Big Deal. Crucially for this story, they introduced 08 and 09, Dark Driftwood and Very Dark Cocoa respectively. Browns are really useful in lots of designs, so these new colours were put to work immediately.

Chart Design is…complicated (and I don’t do it myself so bear with me). As I said above, the gold standard way to create a pattern is to create it by hand yourself. A more common (and still very effective) way is to run a picture or design through some conversion software, and then adjust the result after (more common when it’s a full picture as opposed to text + flowers).

Important to note that the software is quite sophisticated and will use the surrounding colours to determine the colour chosen, to ensure there is a nice consistent gradient between the colours.

Pattern Maker

When the 35 new colours were added, they were updated in the various common pattern making software. However, for one software there was an issue - the RGB values for 08 and 09 were updated wrong. So when you ran the picture through, it would think it had got it right but in fact it was not. This was quickly picked up by most pattern makers, who would manually change the RGB values in the software and merrily continue on. The pattern software producers also noticed the error and sent out an email explaining the error and instructing the users on how to fix it. However, as you can imagine (because this is a drama post) HAED did not, and continued to make patterns containing 08 and 09 for over two years when the result was a poor match.

The Drama

HAED has its own fans who are very quick to defend HAED and the owner. Some stitchers quickly noted the error with 08 and 09 (there’s quite a popular app where you can mock up what the design will look like before stitching), and several people posted questions about why the mock-up was looking a bit dodgy - they were told that the issue was with the app.

Someone posted in 2019 this example of how 09 was fucking up their project. Initially, this was explained away as an issue with dye lots.

As things can take so long to stitch, sometimes if you replace a skein of floss after a few years there may be a subtle difference in the shade because it’s a different dye lot. As I mentioned at the beginning, DMC is the premier choice of floss because they are incredibly consistent between dye lots, so this is very rarely an issue, and certainly not to the extent the above picture shows. Thread Bare did an excellent write up of why the dye lot argument is bullshit, with pictures, so if you’re interested in more technical detail I would encourage you to look at that.

What makes this drama worse is that the only way you could really get any information from or to the owner is through their Facebook page, which was quick to delete or ridicule commenters who expressed concerns about their patterns.

Even as recently as June 2020, HAED sent an email out blaming the error on dye lots. Quoting from the email “we are seeing this more often” - at what point would it occur to them that perhaps this is an issue with them and not an issue with everyone else?

They sent customers pictures to try and prove there was a dye lot error, whereas it was really just a lighting difference.

Well - as of July 2nd they admitted it is an error with the charting.

[Despite admitting there was an error with the charting, they only closed their store down after 3 days following the backlash that they were still selling known faulty charts with no warning on the site]

But wait - surely this charting error wouldn’t affect HAED, as she hand creates the patterns herself? Well, obviously that claim was total bullshit. Honestly - it wasn’t super surprising, the rate that new, ultra-complex patterns were added to the shop meant that if you thought about it for at least a few moments you could infer that she didn’t hand create these patterns herself.

What’s worse is that she also doesn’t appear to employ test stitchers. Test stitchers are common and will, as the name suggests, test stitch a piece before or even just after sale, just to make sure the final result is good enough. While you wouldn’t expect someone to test stitch an entire 300,000 stitch pattern, most would consider it reasonable to test stitch a small area, particularly an area with the new colours used.

The owner claims that 14000 patterns are affected - even assuming this is a mistype, 1400 patterns is an overwhelming amount to fix.

Reminder - these kits cost $200+ each, and she’s not doing anything more than running it through some software.

Now, some of you might think, “surely you can just sub in 08/09 with a similar colour and then it’ll be fine”? This is the proposed solution by HAED themselves (see the suggestion in the email to sub out 09 with 3371). In the “re-charted” patterns she’s sent out already, this is in essence what she has done, and there have already been push backs that it still looks awful.

To wheel back to colour theory - there is no floss that corresponds to the incorrect RGB values that were used. And - without getting too technical again, but by subbing around one colour for another, it creates a domino effect with surrounding colours. This may not be an issue in patterns that are meant to look blocky, but in HAED patterns they are meant to look as realistic as possible - one colour throwing off the surrounding colours ripple effects all the way through the pattern.

So now there are a bunch of stitchers that are several hundred dollars and potentially several hundred hours into these pieces, only to be told that they will be sent a ‘recharted’ pattern at some point over the next few months (which will probably not be a proper rechart, but a substitution of a colour one-to-one), and some stitchers are already several thousand stitches into their pieces.

Some additional examples of the errors/ ‘fixes’/mockups

This stitcher (the error is the left-hand side of the birdhouse) was sent a replacement pattern that still looked awful when ran through a mock-up, so has changed it herself (it took her four days to frog the error out and start again)

This edited area looks abysmal and has been told by the owner that it is correct and fine

The top left next to the needle minder is very poorly coloured, and this poor person is about 150,000 stitches in.

The HAED ‘mockup’ vs the predicted result

This fireplace is light purple-brown vs the intended dark brown

The left is the 09 chart and the right is the fix - the right is still not great.

The Fallout

People are mad and upset. This is an expensive item that is faulty, there was a known error for two years that was not fixed, and people who did express concern were deleted/banned from the Facebook page. People may well be hours and hours into their chart only to be told it’s going to look shit. HAED are rapidly losing their image as the premier full coverage producer, it is a major fall from grace.

There is no other way to get information than through the Facebook group, and not only are they banning anyone criticising HAED from their group, they’re banning members who criticise HAED in other groups pre-emptively.

There is also the question about how this is going to work going forward - if 08 and 09 are removed from the pattern, there is going to be no way to tell if a pattern for sale was affected by this situation or not [Aside from the drama, the HAED website is absolutely awful to browse at the best of times]. You could end up paying for a chart that may never have been charted correctly in the first place.

A lot of people have been moving to different full coverage creators, who do employ test stitchers, run the software with edits made afterwards, and don’t just whack in the picture, turn the number of colours to 250 and the biggest size and hope for the best.

A number of people are calling out the owner for lying about creating the charts herself in the first place when this is now very obviously not true.

There are also many stitchers submitting refunds through their credit cards for faulty goods.

There’s also some rumblings that not only have 08 and 09 been affected but the other 32 new colours - if that’s true it could very well sink HAED completely, if they haven’t been sunk already.

Others are contacting the artists that licence their work to HAED explaining the issues and the terrible customer service, and already there are rumours they will retract their licence as a result (no screenshots of this as it’s only rumoured at the moment). Some very kind artists are letting people who purchased faulty kits run the original, high def artwork through a better pattern creating software so they have an accurate pattern to use.

For me, personally, the fallout involved a very emotional throwing away of the kit I had invested over a few hundred hours in and picking up one of the other dozen non-HAED kits I have instead.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here