Hidden Harbor

Next section is complete.

And, oh! What's that in the bottom right corner? It's Not-Sky! \o/ That little arc of green is the start of the grass on top of the cliffs, which means that the next section (already marked off with the guide thread up there) should also have me starting on the purple mountains in the background.

Hidden Harbor

Another section down! More sky... still. I swear, there's something other than sky coming up after the next section or two.

You know that last section - with the 4248 stitches all the same colour?

I started it today, and finished it today. Now that was a lot of stitching!

Hidden Harbor

Only three colours left to go in this section! Because out of 7464 stitches in this section, 4248 (almost 57%) are all the same colour! Wheeeee!

Hidden Harbor

Four pages officially done. Apparently, that makes me hit over 4% complete... I didn't think it would since there's 104 pages total, but then again the far right and far bottom ones won't be quite as large, and apparently it's enough to push me over the 4% mark.

I'm doing the next section as all four pages across, and you can see the grid markings already along the bottom of the next step. 

I should probably wash off those guidelines before they set in...

Hidden Harbor

Finished off the first colour in this section, starting on the second. I'm SO looking forward to the next section, where there will be things other than sky!

Hidden Harbor

Waste knots are gone (of course), and starting on the first colour of this next section.

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Since the HAED pattern symbols are just text (using a font made up of symbols), I can easily copy and paste right out of the PDF into a text file, and analyze that with my traveling salesman program. It's easy enough to copy each page one by one, but since I'm doing rows across pages for this one, I didn't want to take the time to copy the pages row by row into a text file.

So I wrote a quick PowerShell program to grab the rows from each page, and stick them together so that 

1 1 1

2 2 2

3 3 3

becomes

1 2 3

1 2 3

1 2 3

But then, I was having trouble with the next section, and the text wasn't combining properly in all of the output files. So I rewrote the script in C#, where I can throw different encodings at the files (I mean, you can probably do that in PowerShell too but I'm more comfortable in C#). Well, long story short, turns out I had encoded the first couple of input files in ANSI, and the rest in UTF8. So I redid the files, made sure that they were all encoded in the same way, and lo and behold the combining worked properly.

Here's an example output from the traveling salesman program btw (this is the current colour I'm working on up above):

It separates out all the stitches by colour, then plots a (close enough) optimal route through them.

I really need to get around to making the start and end stitch a different colour. Not that it's hard or time consuming, I just have to remember to do it when I'm at the computer and have time.

Hidden Harbor

3 pages down! More sky, of course... still got to take out the waste knots, but it's late and I can totally do it tomorrow.

Hidden Harbor

Page 2 done! Or rather, 2 pages worth of stitching done. We've got some stars in the sky up there now.

Hidden Harbor

So I was thinking that the dark blue colour on the first page didn't look very good (especially the single stitches around the orange clouds), but figured that it would be zoomed out enough eventually that it wouldn't be so bad. But then I was looking at the original painting and thinking that it looked different more... purple.

Double checked the pattern. Turns out this symbol:

 I thought was this symbol:

 When it was actually this symbol:

So. Once I finished off my current colour on the second 'page', I went back to the first page,

 tore out all of the incorrect stitches (1275 of them),

 And put them all back in with the correct colour.

I still think it looks a little bit odd, but at this point if it turns out messed up the colour a second time, I'm not going to undo it again.