Following charts

[cairee]

I make working copies and use a highlighter to mark completed stiches. I dont mark parked threads, that takes too much time.
...

I'm not sure how that takes more time. I already have the highlighter in front of the pattern to mark what I just finished. It's just one more dot on the page to mark the parked thread. I use those marked parks to assess my attack strategy. I guess I'd waste more time figuring out what makes sense to do next than it does for me to add a dot to the page when I park the thread. I don't park in 10x10 squares. Maybe that's the difference.

that would be the difference. Im parking in 10x10 squares, the thread goes to the next stich in that square, or in the next square down.

[Fizzbw]

I'm a cross country stitcher. I have poor concentrations skills so I'm very careful how I mark my charts.mi take photocopies of smaller designs at home, or print the chart off, but anything bigger or in to colour chart I get enlarged and colour photocopied in town.

I mark the stitches I'm going to stitch. So these days I use coloured highlighter pens (ten different colours) and I colour in the next symbol I'm doing in the area I'm stitching in. Then I usually do another two symbols in the same area in a contrasting colour if the first one is not a big area. Then I stitch. I can also use the pattern that the coloured in symbols make overall as a guide to my stitching correctness. When finished I shade in all the completed symbols with pencil, then I can use the same colour pens to highlight the next bunch of symbols if I want to.

It's a little time consuming but it almost eradicates my mistakes and my need to constantly check and count the chart. I can literally forget between counting the number on the chart to when I get to the fabric to count them!!! I blame the drugs....


I try and save all my used charts, less because I may want to stitch them again and more out of a hoarding OCD thing.....

Niki xxx

[Allyn]

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.... I can literally forget between counting the number on the chart to when I get to the fabric to count them!!! I blame the drugs...

Niki xxx

I do the same thing. I blame the lack of drugs.....

[Cora]

When I used to work from kits I'd try to mark off with a highlighter, but it became more of hassle for me. I changed to cutting up the chart in manageable sections that I could hold and stitch at the same time. Lately I've been working from charts in books, books are hard for me to work out. I scan the chart and print it out on photo paper. It makes a really good quality image, then I cut that up into smaller sections. I find that I can focus better on a small piece of the chart than if I'm looking at a bigger chart. I kind of get over whelmed with a big chart, and try to get too ambitious, like trying to do all of one color even if the next section of that color is really far away from where I'm working right now. That leads me to counting mistakes and generally abandoning the project.

[kinley626]

Like most here, I make a working copy of my chart. I also enlarge the copies so that I don't go cross-eyed trying to read the tiny symbols. But highlighting doesn't work for my brain. I use a red sharpie marker to cross off the stitches I've completed. They are done and I get a kick out of marking them through in a bold red line. Hmmm - that may be the teacher in me coming out. I circle my parked threads on the chart with a blue pen.

[NeedleAndFork]

Most of the time I prefer to work with my chart off my laptop screen. For my HAED, I imported the PDFs into photoshop and recombined all the pages into a single large image. This comes in handy because I don't park in a strict grid but just follow what seems appropriate for the section I'm stitching. I use a square shaped 'paintbrush' to highlight squares that I've stitched in one color, and a different color to highlight where I've parked a thread. That ends up looking something like this..



For a sense of scale - that's a 17 inch laptop screen! That's why I like working off my laptop screen - I can enlarge it big enough that I can set the laptop down close by, but not in my way and use a cordless mouse to mark things off as I work. No risk of getting highlighter on my stitching!

The multi color highlights you see there are because I use a different color each day so I can get a sense of the progress I make - handy when working on a HAED where sometimes you feel like you're not making any progress. The orange highlight marks where there are parked threads - that color stays the same every day, and I have a palette of 7 other colors that I rotate through depending on what day of the week it is. This also results in a very colorful chart as I work on it. That's what my current avatar is - a fairly old screenshot of my pattern. Here's what it looks like now..

[cairee]

for kits and BAPs that I will likely never stitch again I highlight in yellow on the chart. for projects that I may stitch again, or give/sell/donate/trade the chart when Im done I make a working copy that I highlight, It gets thrown out after Im done.

[fccs]

I always make a copy of my chart and highlight it as I go. I'm afraid to do so on the original, because if it gets totally messed up, torn, creased beyond recognition, I'm up a creek. I've never used a laptop for charts but I have used my iPad, highlighting the stitches I've completed.

I think it just takes some experimentation to find the solution(s) that work best for you.

[NeedleAndFork]

I've never used a laptop for charts but I have used my iPad, highlighting the stitches I've completed.

That's actually where I got the idea from - but my tablet at the time was a 7" kindle fire, and I couldn't find an app that let me highlight as easily as I wanted to.. not to mention I was usually either using it to listen to Pandora, or running paid videos on it while I stitch. That lead me to experimenting with my laptop and landed me at the method I use now. For something as large as my HAED, I only work on it in one set place anyway, and my laptop is always close at hand. For smaller charts I'll usually just put them on my nexus tablet and stitch from there, and not bother marking things off as I go.

[richardandtracy]

Thus far I have tended to use charts created by a program I wrote myself. The charts it produces can be printed out in colour or B&W at any size from 3 symbols per inch to 40 symbols per inch. I think that covers most reasonable ranges, and some unreasonable ones too. Generally print them out at 10 symbols to the inch, and monochrome is more usually the preferred style, though my latest (Luis Royo one) is easier to read in colour.

I have never, to date, marked my charts in any way other than to write the start and finish dates on each sheet. As a result I keep the sheet I'm working on in a plastic wallet for protection.

Regards,

Richard