Harriet Holtby 1836

 Last Wednesday Debbie and I were stitching together. Do you kinda feel like Debbie is your best friend too since I talk about her so much here? You all would love her and I'm so, so lucky to have met her.

I grabbed my phone to look up something and there in my email was another from Sheri at Colorado Cross Stitcher letting the stitching world know that there was a new exclusive at Colorado Cross Stitcher - Harriet Holtby 1836.

Instantly, I knew this was a chart I had to have. I ordered it and it arrived today. I ordered it and it arrived today. As soon as it arrived, I stopped what I was doing,  made the PDF, got it all set up in Markup, got the linen loaded on a frame and I'm going to start this tonight.

In the past when I've used NPI floss, I've kept it in the plastic floss bags. I'm tempted to put it on floss drops this time. Any advice about that?

Another thing I always do is print a color working copy. I keep that - all of it if it will fit - in one page protector. The cover photo is always on the front and whatever page I'm currently working on is on the back so I can have it easily visible.

I work from Mark-up, which I love but sometimes it's easier to have a bigger "shot" of what I'm working on. Example: On this chart, I'm going to start with the border at the middle top. As I'm working towards the right or left, on what I'm seeing on Mark-up, I won't even have a whole repeat. I could but then that makes the squares small enough that even touching them with a stylus, I'm making mistakes and sometimes, it's hard to see the floss symbol if the squares are too small so I can be glancing at the paper chart as I'm working off Mark-up to kinda get the big picture. I guess it's kinda like driving with GPS. I like having the very closeup street map when I'm making turns but if I'm just hauling it down the interstate, I want to see all the way from Louisiana to Missouri on that screen!  :)

Also, there's a bin behind my stitching chair that is labeled "Original Charts". The original chart goes in there. When I was working on a rather large chart a couple of years ago, I wasn't using Mark-up but I had a working copy and the original. Both were in my project bag and I lost that project bag. I spent weeks looking for that bag. Just before I ordered a new chart, I found it and said to myself - never again will I have the working copy and the original chart in the same bag!

So . . I'm fixing to take my first few stitches in Harriet!