The winner of Great Greeting Card Contest

Stitches Magazine—Greeting Card Contest

October 17, 2005

1. What can you tell me about the inspiration for your winning design?

   Our embroidered Christmas (holiday) cards have always been a great success with our customers and, over the years, we have received quite a few compliments and thank-you notes. For that reason and because it inspires us to do something different and even more challenging each year, we look forward to this project.
   
   We have an excellent team of digitizers who come from art backgrounds and enjoy creating complex designs. We chose a Monet painting because he is well-known throughout the world and was a pioneer in the Impressionist movement—something we strive to be in our business. Plus, we knew the interplay of light and color in Water Lily Pond would be especially difficult to translate into stitches.
   
   

2. How long did the piece take to create?

   We spent ten hours on the digitizing and over 30 hours fine tuning for production.

   
   
   
3. What type of machine(s) did you use? What was the stitch count?

   We used a Barudan machine at 650 rpm and rayon thread. The design was 45,220 stitches. There were 12 colors and 20 color changes.

   
   
   
4. Was there anything different or unusual about creating or producing the design? What presented the most problem?

   Getting the right blend of colors to faithfully replicate the painting, while using an entirely different medium, is what challenged our team the most. Specifically, the intricacy of the water and the lilies was the hardest part of the design.

   
   
5. Are there any other comments you would care to make regarding your winning piece?

   Once this painting was selected as the subject for our holiday card, our team worked very hard to ensure the end product was true to the original and illustrated the attention to detail and high-quality we try to deliver to our customers every single day. When we finally saw the stitched card and heard reactions from coworkers, clients and others, all the hours of effort were worth it.

   
   
   

The names of those involved and their respective titles:

• Tinna Hall, Administrative Services Manager
• Firoj Mujawar, Senior Digitizer
• Yogendra Bhagat, Manager of Embroidery
• K.T. Radhakrishnan, Manager of Embroidery
• Vinita Ram, Executive Director of Operations

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