Charting

Based on the old hat, I decided that the wreath should be 6 inches wide. So, I started with one of the Traceable Art Laurel Wreath files. I opened it in Paint and resized it to be 6 inches wide. Note that the grid divides each inch into quarters.

Since each inch is four boxes, I resized the file to be 24 inches (four times bigger). Thus, 4 inches/16 boxes is the equivalent of 1 inch of the original sized image. This allows easy conversion to 16 stitches per inch of linen.

I used Excel to re-create the shapes as rows of embroidery, by filling in the cells corresponding to the boxes in Paint. If half or more of the box in Paint was filled, I turned the full cell in Excel green. Afterwards I went back and adjusted the chart if the shape didn't look quite right.

I decided to work the stems in horizontal stitches and leaves in vertical stitches.