Charting, Mermaid and Inky Darkness

 It's funny how when you are self-taught and you find a way to do something you sort of assume that everyone does it that way too as it seems obvious.  Recently I've seen a few posts where people have referred to marking off their stitches on photocopied charts with a pen, so I thought they did it like me.  But it seems people only use one colour (opens eyes in amazement).  I have always produced a multi-coloured pattern as I go.  It just seemed logical, if you are stitching dark blue then why mark it in fluero yellow?  And you get a lovely coloured-in version of your work!  Here is my mermaid, she seems to have 4 arms because she's copied onto 2 A3 pages and I like a large overlap.

 And here's the stitched version.  I found a new setting on my camera which takes a more accurate colour picture.  I have started the metallics which I'm loving.  I can't believe I let blending filament put me off using Kreinik #4 for so long!  I was glad I saved some of the boring border because we had a two hour power cut one evening this week and I ended up sewing by the light of a 60W energy saving bulb hubby had wired to an inverter attached to the car!  He actually bought the inverter to keep the fridge-freezer going during such events but he allowed me one light too!  Large boy had a chargeable emergency light in his room, good job we're prepared!

This is the latest square on The Dark Alphabet.  Very intensely stitched and different in places to the chart.  I stitched the bottom /// in black and the top \\\ in 939 navy.  I did all the /// first and then all the \\\ as I thought it might seem quicker that way and I'd only have to count once!  I still miscounted in about 6 places and as I refuse to frog over 1 the last two branches are a little different to Julie's.  I also made one window into a door.  The large boy liked this square and used the house for inspiration for his latest drawing entitled "Bib-babs and friends in a graveyard".  Nice child.
For new followers this is a design by  A Note of Friendship in memory of Lisa Roswell.  they produce a new letter every few weeks and I'm stitching them as I go.  I seem to be the only person keeping up with the design but I have a plan....

I have managed to get Google Reader to play nicely this week.  Every time I've tried to use it, the entries are all squashed up and you can't see anything until you click on them.  But this week I'd got really far behind with my reading (the world and his wife blogged at the end of July) and tried again to use it.  One day I went into the Reader via my "history" rather than my dashboard and Hey Presto it looked great - I could see all the posts and everything!  I can now keep up with everyone's blogs and never miss a single vital post!

Finally, the Travelling Pattern arrived this afternoon.  Perfect timing as I've just finished "I" and am ready to start the next thing ("J" is nearly finished, only one day's work there).  This pattern started with Daffycat and came to me from Erin from Fairy Tales and French Knots.  I'm off now to choose some fabric and threads.