Title: USS Enterprise LCARS Ship Blueprint
Date Completed: August 2020
Design: Lord Libidan
Count: 14
Canvas: Black
Colors: 9
Pop Culture: Star Trek The Next Generation
 
I called my Star Trek Voyager Blueprint Cross Stitch my magnum opus, but apparently, I was wrong.
 
I started planning my Voyager blueprint years before I started it, with tests in my Star Trek cross stitch book and my LCARS what happens on the holodeck cross stitch, however, it never really worked for me, so I looked at doing a realistic screen accurate LCARS interface, and I chose a blueprint for it. It was one of the only patterns I’ve made to take me over 100 hours, and I was proud as hell. I added in so many details, so many little hints at storylines, and it’s a super-accurate blueprint to boot! However, I kept getting the same question come up “will you do an Enterprise?”.
 
It turns out, that whilst Voyager has always been my favorite Star Trek, for most people, it’s the Next Generation. This has two major problems with it though, problems I had to overcome. Firstly, there are 7 series (178 episodes) and 4 movies, all of which have their own hints at what the Enterprise contains, and what it can do. So I had to watch them. All of them. That’s not really too hard of a task, but my notes during the 200+ hours of watching were extensive, so I had to add that into the design. This is slightly more complicated by the fact that there are no ‘real’ blueprints out there for inspiration.

The second issue was that of size. The Enterprise D is 2-3 times larger than voyager in all dimensions. This makes it larger, sure, but combined with all the extra secrets I added in there, more complicated. Then, and this has always been a big thing for me, I wanted these patterns to look like real screens that could be used at any time, so I had to make it appropriate for a screen size, used in the series.
 
However, I put all of this together and even managed to reduce the number of colors from 13 to 11, whilst adding in a whole bunch of extras that were still in keeping, but also period-specific (LCARS changed between Next Generation and Voyager, in both colors and design). Then came the stitching, for which I had to buy a new cross stitch frame large enough!