Saturday 25 July 2020

The Loneliness Of Autumn - 70 hours

Hi all!

It was back to normal this month, stitching the allotted 10 hours on The Loneliness Of Autumn, the big project Leonore and I are SALing over the next 4-5 years.

During this 10 hours I finished off the second colour, dark blue 939, and made a very small start on the third, 3865 off-white.

Here are the comparison pictures between the completion of the first and second colours. This is now 14.81% complete with 9,866 stitches after 69 hours 30 minutes.



Very luckily I didn't find one counting error with the black. There was always the possibility that, stitching extreme cross country with un-gridded fabric, some of the first colour would be in the wrong place but, nope, all is well and I am pleased to report I can obviously count!

And here are the 60 and 70 hour comparison pictures with the start of the off-white. The 30 minutes remaining from my allotted 10 hours was enough to stitch all of 3865 on the top four pages, not that there's much (about 50 stitches) and not that you can really see it against the cream fabric but, trust me, it's there!




There will eventually be 3,086 stitches of 3865 which will generally make up the lamp lights and their reflections on the ground. There's lots of block stitching to look forward to as I get further down the design. For a bit of fun I thought I'd show you the chart I'm working from, basically 16-and-a-bit sheets of A4.



I scour the chart and highlight the colour to stitch in pink, and when I've worked the stitches go over the pink with blue. I know Pattern Keeper is the obvious choice with full coverage pieces but I'm an old-fashioned girl and do like my paper copies and highlighters. Or, to put it another way, if there's an easier way I won't take it!!!

I'll add Leonore's progress after 7 months here once she's posted. Remember, she's stitching a bigger version by a different company so our stitching is not exactly comparable, but that's the exciting part of the SAL; it would be boring if they were both the same.

Take care,
Rachel x

8 comments:

Cathy said...

Congratulations on not finding any errors in the black! You're making great progress and starting with the black was a good idea, because you can start to see the outlines of some things.

Jo who can't think of a clever nickname said...

Thank you for circling the white! It's exciting that you are on the third colour already.

I like to highlight my charts too. I am currently working off a pencil on graph paper version of the over one skin for the Joan Elliott Faces SAL. I just redraw it myself!

Faith... said...

You can definitely see the how many stitches you added.

I don't use paper charts. I stitch everything from my laptop. If the chart is paper I scan it into an adobe file and then I mark off the stitches on there. I hate having tons of paper laying around so this eliminates that. I can also make the chart as big as I want to since some of them are smaller and harder to see.

Annie said...

What a fascinating post! Love reading about all the ins and outs of a project, and to see the progress and how your chart looks! And I'm in awe of what you accomplish with this project; well done! I think just the size of that chart would put me off that project, haha:D Can't wait for the next update!!

Tiffstitch said...

Woohoo! That sounds amazing! I've had counting errors even with PK, so it's clearly user error there. :)

Leonore Winterer said...

Woo, how exciting you're already on your 3rd colour! Those colour changes will come so much quicker now. I'm also happy to see we are aout the same way in % wise!

Katie said...

Fantastic progress!!! Love watching this one grow.

Astrids dragon said...

Always a relief to have no errors, and the progress looks great.
I love my highlighters too, I've got lots of colours to choose from... old school!