HAED = Heaven and Earth Designs. With rare exception, these are full coverage designs using 85-90 colors on average. The instructions and directions are written for 25ct fabric, but one can always use one’s own judgement.
There are literally dozens of artists; unfortunately my OZ friend Jill pointed out that Randal Spangler has had a number of his designs charted. I own all four high end puzzles of his art work that Artifact Puzzles produces.
The Case of the Empty Cookie Jar
The charted pattern is 66 x 369 (or something close to that). That is 24354 stitches in total. I am stitching on 16ct gridded Aida. And started the week of 10 Nov. It took a couple of days to get organized (which mostly consisted of running around and trying to make sure that I had all of the required colors of floss.
The actual design is that of a book spine – The Case of the Empty Cookie Jar by Dragatha Christie – complete with small dragon holding a candle and a large magnifying glass.
Methodolgy. I started by completely the outline above the book simply because there were large amounts of a limited number of colors. There are those who stitch block by block, those who go cross country (doing all of one color in an area before moving on to the next color), and then those who stitch on the diagonal. I started with a mishmash of all of the above simply because I wanted to start, and also because the colors which I was missing turned out to be needed right at the beginning.
Since then, I have attempted to fill in all the holes, and will be using a modified version of the diagonal. That is why you see all those threads hanging down – they are parked in the lower left hand corner of the next instance of that color. I started with the canvas originally on a Q-snap, but have shifted to a lap scroll-frame.
The finished piece, directly off the Q-snap used at the end –
The Case of the Empty Cookie Jar
The progress photos have been moved to here.
