First up is Fractal 276 Bookmark. Sorry, that's what it is called. I think this was one of the daily freebies from Cross Stitch Collectibles that I downloaded last summer. I thought I would do it on 18-count canvas, in needlepoint. It will be a little big for a bookmark, but a reasonable size for an experiment! Finished size on 18 will be about 4.25" x 11". These pictures show the original pattern.Well it was designed with 79 colors of floss. I decided it would be "fun" to try to cut this down. The chart was only in symbols, no color. So, being crazy, I copied it, one square at a time, into my charting program. This took a couple of weeks. Then I pulled all 79 colors of floss. The charting program tells me how many stitches there are of each color. So my first task was to delete any color with less than 20 stitches. Right away that cuts it down quite a bit. I would pull the to-be-deleted-color, find another color in the pattern that was almost the same and substitute. Next I matched up colors that, when stitched, would show little, if any, difference, like black & dark navy. I kept on like this till I was down to about 50 colors. Then by using an overdye to substitute for several colors in the background, I ended up with a total of 46 colors. The picture below is my revised chart.
Now I get to stitch this baby! I am going to substitue #12 Kreinik Braid for quite a few of the colors in the light swirly part, I think. We'll see how it goes. I'm not sure how I will tackle this, I guess I'll just start in the upper right corner & go. I'll keep you posted!
1 comment:
It's always good to learn how other stitchers approach a new project. I think I would have done something similar myself. You don't need so many colors on a fairly small project. I look forward to seeing this progress.
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