A week or two ago, I blogged breathlessly about seeing and LOVING the MOL "alligator carrying a shipping container" logo in the Port Elizabeth Intermodal Depot.

I CONTINUE to think this alligator is fantastic, so I made a needlepoint pattern from it in Pixen, which is a pixel-art editor for OS X that I totally recommend. Here’s a low-res version (the 3600px original is available on Flickr):

The darker-value pixels make a 10×10 grid. When transferring the design to the canvas, I first marked every 10th thread intersection with a small blue dot, and then worked one grid "box" at a time, marking each thread intersection with a fine-point pigma pen.

Marking canvases is HARD WORK, man. Stitching is nothing but fun after that. Well, picking the colors is tricky; two skeins will look totally different in the hand, but then on the canvases they’ll turn out to have totally the same value, and you can’t tell them apart. Kate, with her practiced eye for color, has been really helpful. Lydia, on the other hand, wants me to do it in purple. And pink. And instead of an alligator, have a flower and a butterfly.

You’ll notice that the alligator has an anchor tattoo, which is what made me want to include the sailor’s anchor tat in the booth last weekend.