We wanted something small and a little funny for the front, the kind of detail someone notices across a lunch table. The printed tin is the joke, and the stitched lemons are where the work went. Each lemon is built from tiny square stitches laid on a grid, which gives it the look of pixel art. An artisan stitches every lemon by hand, so no two shirts come out exactly the same.

See its sister piece, the Summer on the Inside Tee.

Cross stitch is a form of hand embroidery made of small X-shaped stitches, each filling one square on a grid. That grid is why it suits pixel art so well. Both COZY x Pixel Stitch embroidered tees are part print and part hand stitching.

Our designer drew each piece first. Pixel Stitch then redrew every stitched element square by square, one square for each stitch. The finished grid is a stitch map, with a symbol for every thread colour matched against Pixel Stitch's thread book. We kept the palette small: blue, orange, white and a lemon yellow.

We cut, sew and screen print the tees in Karachi. We chose screen printing on purpose, because a needle tears through a heat transfer sheet but passes cleanly through a screen print.

Each artisan gets a packet with the printed pattern and the exact threads for her piece. She fixes a small hoop over the spot, lays dissolvable stitching cloth with the pattern on top, and stitches through the cloth and the tee together. She uses a double thread so the stitches sit full and close, with no fabric showing between them. Then the tee is washed. The cloth dissolves and the stitches stay in the cotton.

Thread colour can shift slightly from one tee to the next, which comes with hand work. The process is slow, and that is why there are only 40.

Pixel Stitch started after its founder, Hasan Habib, visited the Prince Barkat Foundation in Gilgit and met women doing intricate floral cross stitch that had no market. Pixel Stitch turns that skill into modern pixel art so the artisans can earn from it. Its goal is to reach 1,000 women artisans across Pakistan.

We found them at Mashion in Karachi, bought one of their frames, and asked if they would make something with us. The artisans who stitched this collection are paid directly for their work on it, and each purchase supports them.

See more of their work on the Pixel Stitch website and on Instagram at @pixelstitchco.

Every Sardines & Lemon Tee ships with a free limited edition COZY bag in butter yellow. You also get a thank-you video from one of the Pixel Stitch artisans, so you can see who is behind the work.

The tee is 220 GSM COZY Cotton, cut and sewn in-house in Karachi, the same fabric as the rest of our graphic tees. It does not shrink.

• Machine wash inside out with similar colours
• Line dry away from direct sunlight
• Do not iron on print and embroidery
• Do not bleach
• Do not tumble dry
• Iron on reverse

• Exchanges accepted for 30 days
• No Returns
• Customer provides return shipping

Please note that there can be slight variations in the coloration of our products between different fabric compositions.

If you would like to purchase a complete set in the same colorway, we recommend buying from the same fabric collection to avoid any color discrepancy in your set.