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I noticed that when i stitched some of my HAED in 10 by 10 blocks, it caused faint lines to appear between the edge of the block and the rest of the stitching. Hopefully you can see what i mean in this picture, in the red circled bit you should be able to see faint vertical lines.
I have heard several other people complain of the same problem, especially those who stitch their whole piece in 10 by 10 blocks, or between pages. Rather than being caused by uneven tension, it appears to be simply because of the way the stitches are formed on the back of the fabric. Stitching in blocks causes an empty line to form on the back of your work, a line where there are no threads crossing from one side of the square to the other. This means that the stitches on the left of this line are being pulled to the left, and the stitches on the right are being pulled to the right, leaving a slight gap in the middle.
I have heard that the lines are erased with washing and ironing the project at the end, but personally i think i will just try to avoid them in the first place by not stitching in blocks.
I’ve been working hard on my Heaven And Earth Designs piece, The Awakening by Jonathon Earl Bowser. I’ve now finished all the sky on page 2 of the chart, and the colours look really lovely. I’ve also been doing lots of the archway and that’s coming on really well now. I find it amazing how all these seemingly random colours come together to produce a beautiful piece of artwork. It can be kind of scary to stitch with a bright purple colour next to a bright blue but when viewed from a distance it all combines together and works.
I’ve been working on this quite a lot over the last few days, mostly on the archway part, which has a lot more colours in it than it looks on the photo (about 20).
I have also noticed that the part of the sky i did in blocks you can see a line down the edge of the blocks i stitched in (not visable on the photo). I have heard of a few other people having this problem but that it helps when you wash the piece at the end. I’m not too bothered because i only did it on a small part and you can’t see it unless you look closely, but it’s made me think twice about the way i do the rest of my stitches.
So these snow days have finally given me a chance to go back to my HAED, The Awakening. I’ve worked on it a bit over the last couple of days, mostly on the sky, but then i got bored of that section as there were only a couple of colours, and moved down to carry on with the arch at the bottom of the page. This second page is almost half complete now.
I had a nice surprise today in the form of a day off, because the snow made it too dangerous to drive. So in amongst the essay writing and getting distracted by the internet i managed to get a bit of stitching done. Max now has a moon, and some of the fern in the bottom left. The fern is actually taking quite a long time even though it’s just backstitch.
I have set up a links section on my website www.craftsncreatures.com, both a section for art and craft related sites, and one for all other websites. So if anyone reading this has an interesting cross stitch blog then we would love to hear about it. All you have to do is register on the forum and make 5 posts.
I’d also like to apologise for not updating you on my stitching recently, i’ve been very busy with work and haven’t really had time for any, but hopefully you will be getting another update soon.