A couple of tough days here… must be spring fever! Everything is in bloom and starting to come back to life after the sleepy winter months. Even Jessie is running around like a crazy little kitty these days. I almost think we need a traffic light here in the house so we know when it is safe to cross the room! You don’t really want to collide with a full grown cat racing through the house at top speed, do you?
I worked on something different yesterday, and I did promise a progress picture on the geese for the RCMP detachment in British Columbia. You can scroll down to the previous post for the reference picture, or simply click here.
I know, it really does not look like much of anything. This is the lighter silhouetted goose on the left, and I am using DMC 3813 for this one. When we work on squares for these quilts, we often are given a minimum-maximum size range along with any other special instructions. For these hand cross-stitched quilts, we are told between 6 and 8 inches for the design size, but we are not told what fabric size to choose. That is really up to us to figure out.
The chart on this says the design is about 130 stitches wide by 90 stitches tall. I can either break out my calculator or use
a fabric size calculator on websites like Cyberstitchers (I use theirs because it is easy and they have a simply fantastic website with tons of useful stitching information).
When you click on their Fabric Size Calculator, all you have to do is put in the dimensions from the chart and you can easily see how big the stitched piece will be on different sized fabrics. I like it because I can compare the size outcomes side by side. Looking at the sizes, if I went with 14 or 16 count Aida, it would simply be too large. Ah, but look at what that gives us on 18 count Aida! A very nice 7 inches wide by 5 inches high! This should give a nice sized square PLUS I will be using only a fraction of the floss that I would stitching this with 2 strands of floss on 14 count.
I am actually finding this faster to stitch than it would be with 2 threads because I don’t have to worry about trying to keep the threads laying flat (I will do more about that later!). With good lighting, it really isn’t that much different from stitching on the other counts. It just takes a bit of patience, but that is true with all needlework, right?
Will update again in a few days – probably over the weekend.
Until next time, Happy Stitching!
I worked on something different yesterday, and I did promise a progress picture on the geese for the RCMP detachment in British Columbia. You can scroll down to the previous post for the reference picture, or simply click here. 