Hidden Harbor

Next section completed! Which puts me at 8 out of 104 pages completed, or 8.02% done :)

I bought a new scroll frame this week that should be wide enough to fit this piece (sideways, but what can you do?). I don't technically feel like I really need it until I finish off the next four pages (that's about what will fit in the Q-snap), but it'll be good to get it on the new frame.

Hidden Harbor

I was having a REALLY hard time getting a shot of this one that wasn't super blurry for some reason. I've got three colours left in this section. This is what a long weekend will get you :)

Those cliffs on the right look a whole lot better when you zoom out. I'm very pleased with colour of the grass on the second ledge; the darkening of the green towards the right side is very satisfying.

I didn't think the mountain would be quite so... pink. But I double checked the mockup on HAED's website, and it definitely looks pink. So I'm pretty sure I've used the right colour there.

I thought that the second mountain would be a little bit higher and quite visible in this section, but it looks like just the very tip-top of it's going to be visible until I get a little bit lower.

The thread on the back behind those cliffs is THICK. There are a lot of colours with only a couple stitches in that section, so there's a lot of carried threads in the back. You can see there are a lot more waste knots on that side.

Hidden Harbor

Another section completed... I thought that there would be the tops of those purple mountains in this section: I think the small darker pink section right in the middle on the bottom is the very top of the right mountain, but I'll have to get farther into the bottom section here to confirm.

I would post more frequent WIP shots, but the problem is that these sections are made up of a lot of very light colours, and it's very hard to tell the difference between what's stitched and what's still empty cloth, so you can't really see anything in the WIP shots.

I also picked up a copy of The World of Cross Stitching magazine this week, and spent a couple hours working on this piece instead of Hidden Harbor. This is supposed to be inserted in a cut-out greeting card, but I haven't made the effort to assemble the card yet.

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.

Hidden Harbor

Since I can't really grid the fabric with the pens I've got, I decided to do longer, thinner sections. I ran a grid thread along the bottom to count out every 10, and then I'm just resigning myself to counting the vertical. This section is 3 pages wide and 1/3 page(ish) tall, so I can finish three pages in three sections. Once I finish off this first set of pages, I'll switch to 4 pages wide (it fits nicely in the Q-snap) and 1/4 page tall.

This current colour I'm working on (the darker blue in the top right corner) is the one with the most stitches in this section. It's got 3203 stitches in a section with 7623 total... 42%. at least once that's done there won't be all that much left in this section! I think I've only done about 300 or so stitches of that one, so there's still a good chunk left.

Hidden Harbour

Page 1 done! Only 103 to go :)

This page was sky and clouds. Page 2 is also sky and clouds... as is page 3... in fact, there's a lot of sky and clouds in my future.

Supersized Hidden Harbor

I was feeling bad about the pokemon piece, so I decided to start on the Hidden Harbor... the pattern is split into 104 pages. 999x749; 748,251 total stitches; 25x18.75 inches on 40ct Verdal; each page is only going to cover 2x2.5 inches. The rough rectangle you see in the picture is the first page.

Going with a waste knot method of locking down the threads on this one, since the stitches are tiny and it's hard to run the thread under stitches on the back (especially with the evenweave, since I'm worried about pushing stitches underneath the weave if I push too hard).

I think I may divide future pages into columns or rows instead of doing the whole thing in one go... I'm having a rough time with the counting going with the whole page since I can't really mark on the canvas (my fabric pen is too big). Maybe I could see if I could find a finer-tipped pen?