A number of posts back, I promised that some big works for you were in progress. The book reviews were some of them. Now, here is the final preparatory step for another. I'm not going to spoil the surprise, and tell you what it will be, but I can share this stage with you, because I think you'll find it useful....More......
The design, created with my StitchPainter program, is for a round cushion 16" in diameter (about 40 cm., give or take, for you metric system people). It has 292 x 292 rows of 18-point stitches because each side has two rows added for the stitching seam; remember, if you stitch on larger whole canvas, the design will be the same, but the overall size will be bigger.
You'll note that the exterior "circles" are not quite circular. That was done on purpose to keep the design more lively. Pulling the shapes into a perfect circle made the design go "dead." Perfection is not always the right answer (keep this in mind when stitching...it eases the conscience, and may save you from unpicking and restitching, if the deviance from the pattern is minimal, and doesn't hurt the final outcome).
When you plan a large project, such as this 16" diameter cushion, keep saving the preparatory stages, so that you can use them, again, for other projects. I have saved the plain grid for myself, should I need it for a square cushion, and here, too, is the circular cushion grid with just the most basic of the circles delimited in dark gray.
The dark gray color represents the areas to be stitched for the design.
The green color represents the areas to be stitched for the seam (and so you can use mixed tag ends of colors because you'll be careful, when sewing, to put them all inside the seam).
The yellow indicates the grid, and is just to help in the creation of the design, and is not to be stitched.
When planning your needlepoint, if you don't use a frame for stitching, you'll need at least one to one and a half inches (about 3 cm. for you metric system folks) of extra canvas at each of the four extreme points of the diagram. If you use a frame, you'll need more, depending on how the canvas is attached to your frame for stitching.
The gridded design is too large for Blogger. It wouldn't even let me upload it in a "small" version, so I've had to create a mock version without the stitch-by-stitch grid, so you can see what I'm talking about, at least. For the real (and fully gridded) design, go to https://sites.google.com/site/starsthisandthat/home/ars-acupicturae-stellae---star-s-needlepoint-art-1/my-designs, which I've created for just such occasions.
Just preparing the grid has taken a number of evenings of work. Even if StitchPainter allows one to draw these simple geometric lines and shapes, easily, the whole design has to be checked and double checked for those "sticky" points (moving towards the left for right handed people; moving towards the right for left handed stitches). On this, see my: http://arsacupicturaestellae.blogspot.com/2010/06/devil-is-in-detailsof-designing.html
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