August 17, 2026 - Cross Stitching - Come Into My Garden - A Start!

 This may be my most favorite project ever! Do I say that about all of them? Maybe but, I do LOVE this one.

Look how pretty that flower is!

I'm so in love with the linen! If Denise were here, I would say I love, love, love this project! We used to laugh about how it sent us over the edge when floss tubers would say "love, love, love". Some still say it but several years ago, some of them would say it a dozen times in one video. Then Denise and I would write each other about something we had found or stitched, and we would say "I love, love, love this!" OK . . a happy memory and no tears! Good job, Judy!

Sunday I started working on the border. I'm making one side of each "x". I just wanted to get the border "outlined". The green for the border is Oscar (my favorite color and the reason I named my sweet baby Oscar!) and I wasn't sure it was going to show up well so in the area around that first flower, I made both sides of the "x" and it shows up fine.

I stitched the first flower, which is in the center of the top border, just to get the placement going for the border. Another reason to start with the border was that this is 36 count linen and I only have 2" on each of the left and right sides. I'll be framing it myself so I'm not concerned about 2" but just wanted to be sure the linen is straight and I wasn't going to get near the bottom and have only 1" or less on one side.

That's another thing about linen from Fabrics by Steph, while I can't guarantee that her linen will always be cut perfectly straight, the few pieces that I have are cut perfectly straight. It's pretty aggravating to get a piece of linen and lose an inch or more because it's cut so crooked. I understand . . it isn't easy to cut it straight but . . 

OK . . no more complaining!

Wait, I take that back. This chart! It was published (or at least delivered to the printer) in 2020. It is not formatted to be used with Markup R-XP. I barely know how to use the app so I should probably not even try to explain this but for a chart to work, say it's six pages and 1, 2 and 3 are at the top and 4, 5 and 6 are at the bottom, the three that are lined up together need to have the same number of vertical stitches. Then the ones that sit on top of each other need to have the same number of horizontal stitches.

Say page 1 is 63 x 102, page 2 is 55 x 102 and page 3 is 28 x 102.

The page 4, could be 63 x 90, page 2 would be 55 x 90 and page 3 is 28 x 90. I have no idea how the designers make it all work but they do but . . not this chart. I fiddled with it for several hours yesterday. Then I decided . . forget it! I'll work from a paper copy. No. My brain said "NOT doing that!"

I was thinking if I copied it, then cut and pasted pieces of the pages together, I might could make it work but, in the end, I decided that Chart #1 will be pages 1, 2 and 3 and Chart #2 will be pages 4, 5 and 6. It's two different projects on the app. It's working. Thank goodness I thought of that!

I didn't want to unroll the whole piece but the border matches up. So thankful for that. I'll be able to stitch mindlessly to complete the other half of the x's and there's a second row of the border but it's just under the first (you can see some of it on the top left). When I'm tired or easily distracted with other things, I'll work on finishing the border.