Every year I struggle with trying to come up with fun gifts for my beloved. This was originally going to be a part of his Christmas present, but…. I caved and decided to give him it a little early.

He has previously stitched a storm trooper, and some other Star Wars characters, and I have stitched him a caffeine molecule so I wondered about stitching something else kinda tech-y for him. I had seen a random QR code on something (does anyone actually use those things?) and it inspired to use one to encode a little message 🙂

I created the QR code using QRStuff.com, where you can create QR codes for anything with almost zero effort.

..and of course the good thing about pictures that involve only squares? Really really simple to turn into a design.

In this case the design is 21 by 21 squares. Cute and small.

You can approach this in two ways: either print it large size and draw in gridlines; or if your printer is being irritating and spewing out alien communications like mine is, you could just draw it out fairly simply using some graph paper.

We’re talking some pretty high tech stuff!

I stitched mine using some stiff white aida, then trimmed it to a few squares border around the stitching:

To frame it, I used backing of some light green thin foam, and some white card just behind the stitching. The card is attached to the foam with double-sided sticky tape, then hot glue to attach the stitching to the card.

I am nothing if not low tech, but it does mean that the stitching stands out a little bit from the background, which I like.

The frame is just a pretty basic unfinished wood frame from Joann.

Et Voilà! A fun little gift he can put on his desk at work, it might confuse people at first as to what it means…. but then… there’s an app for that – and it works!