Well, I spent a few more hours working on this lady. You can see the progress on her sleeve there. I’m actually almost entirely finished the blue in her robes. There’s just a bit to fill in on the bottom of her cape thing. I can’t wait to be finished with the blue!

Alright, another Stitching Blogger’s Question, yay!

Do you mark or hi-lite your patterns or can you follow them without any markings? Do you make copies to mark up, or do you mark originals?

I’ve always used something to mark up my charts. It’s not so much that I can’t follow the charts without marking, but I love “seeing” my progress. There’s something very gratifying and therapeutic about being able to color in chunks of squares. I find it also makes me stitch a bit faster because it is just that much easier to see where I’m going and where I’ve done.

When I first started stitching, I used (*gasp*) pen to colour in my original chart. Eeek. I learned quickly and switched over rather quickly to a pencil. I still use a pencil and I still colour in my originals. Mostly I don’t make working copies because I’m too lazy to go to a photocopying place and spend the money to copy them. Heh. I ran into a problem recently, though, with my Alluring Sorceress where the chart was coming apart due to me folding and unfolding it so much. Luckily, Dimensions is a great company and they sent me out a new chart to replace my destroyed one. I’m thinking I’ll use working copies rather than colouring that chart in!

I’ve beeen working on this lady for… Well, on and off (mostly off) for probably five years at least. I really want to finish it, so I’m going to see if I can really get some good work done on it. I might was well start chronicling progress as of now!

Time for my first Stitching Blogger’s Question. This is a weekly question that is asked and I’ll answer it here!

How do you ‘non-hoopists’ who use a rotation system handle it (as it seems to be lot easier if you are in good terms with hoop)? Do you have several scroll frames? Do you use Q-snaps or maybe something completely different? Or do you just have one or two big projects and others are small enough to be kept in hand while stitching?

This is an easy question for me to answer, as I don’t really stitch in a rotation nor do I use anything to hold my stitching. I’m a purely “in-hand” sort of girl, no matter how large the project. I have a set of Q-snaps hanging around somewhere, but it was just so awkward and bulky to use that I gave up and went back to stitching in hand. It’s how I taught myself to stitch, so I really think that anything else will feel wrong. It would be like stitching each of my crosses backwards!

Don’t you love these “first” welcome posts to new blogs? I do. You know why? Because there’s always such optimism. When you start a blog, you begin it with the best of intentions and the biggest plans and the best hopes for it. Now, I have a lousy track record when it comes to keeping blogs, but I really think I might be able to keep this one. For all of you who are wondering, this blog will solely be for my cross stitch: stories, finishes, pictures of various ones that I’m working on, keeping track of my goals for each month, thoughts, questions and so on, but all to do with cross stitch. If you want my photography, check out BethAllan.com and if you want my personal blog, check out eurotrash.cc.

So. Now we begin; now we start.