Teleidoscope

Sun, May 20, 2007

Jinxed Colors

Posted at 9:30 pm MDT to Technology

I'm trying to reduce the eyestrain I've been experiencing.

I ordered my new glasses yesterday, and coincidentally, the bulb in my main reading/work light burned out, so I replaced it with a slightly brighter, full spectrum bulb.

I'm also making a point of spending time doing other things besides read and write at the computer while I watch TV. (I very rarely just watch TV, I almost always multitask.)

My Kitsunebi cross-stitch project is 18 stitches per inch on black fabric -- not exactly suitable for reducing eyestrain. So yesterday I prepped a couple of kits from my needlework project stash that use white or offwhite fabric and 14 stitches per inch.

I ran blanket stitch around the edges of both cloths to reduce fraying while I work on the cross-stitching and mounted the linen fabric for the project with the smaller finished size on a scroll frame. The other project is too large for scroll bars, but the fabric is Aida cloth, which is quite stiff and less likely to deform when a hoop is used.

I also partially 'gridded' the larger project, loosely tacking a line of gray sewing thread to match the vertical and horizontal group lines closest to the center of the pattern. The pattern is printed on 4 sheets without any overlapping stitches indicated to help in lining things up, and even with the gridding I'm having a little trouble getting the stitch counts right at the page borders.

The gridding thread will be pulled out when the piece is finished. Or when I have stitched enough of the page boundary areas that I decide I don't need the guidelines any more.

One thing that I've noticed on other needlework projects seems to be happening here, too. One particular thread color seems to be jinxed and needs to be unstitched and redone more than the others. This can be tricky if the quantity of that color of thread supplied with a kit is skimpy. But the colors numbers used in the instructions seem to be standard DMC numbers, so if I run short I should be able to get more (though it will be a little annoying if I have to buy a skein of floss to finish five stitches or something.

I'm actually not too worried about running out of 842 floss: I've been able to reuse some of the floss I unstitched, and my stitching style is quite economical, so I usually have lots of kit thread left over.

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