Handling lots of different colored floss

A few years ago, I finished up Angel of Cross Stitch. She had, I believe, 391 colors of DMC floss in the whole project. One of the big questions I got from other stitchers was about managing my thread. How did I organize it? Did I use one needle or several needles threaded with different colors? Well, with that project I just pulled my boxes of DMC floss (I keep it on cardboard bobbins in plastic boxes) out and stacked them on the ottoman in front of me and pulled out what I needed as I needed it.

But Baby Ghosts is different. I only have to deal with 73 colors, most of which need one skein or less with a few needing two or three skeins and then 16 skeins of black floss. So how do I keep the colors straight? First, I decided to buy fresh floss for the whole project. It will take a long time and it drives me crazy when a color is unavailable because it's stuck in another project. I also won't have to worry about little dye lot changes. Then I looked at how the colors were used on my chart. I saw that most of the colors were used in either large areas or over multiple areas of the chart. That means that I'll need most of my colors easily available for the entire project. I have a number of the size 26 needles I'm using for this project in my stash and can get more quite inexpensively in bulk from my local needlework shop, so I can have a threaded needle for each color.

I bought some bobbins and rings. Each thread color except black goes on a bobbin. Each bobbin is marked with both the DMC number and the chart symbol. Then the floss is put on the big rings in the same order as they are on the chart. I pulled out my Pako needle organizer and will use that for all the colors except black. I have a second Pako I'll have to use since each only holds fifty needles. When I use a color for the first time, that threaded needle will go into the correct opening on the Pako. I have the green tomato pincushion for the black floss.

By cutting down on the time needed to find and change out my thread, I hope to have this project move along a little faster. All the needed floss is in one place in a form that's easy for me to find when I need it. In the meantime, the scotch has worn off and I've come to my senses. Someday has come but it's gone as well. So this project is going back in my kitted projects while I finish up my more urgent WIPs. I want to complete "To Honor Elsa" and then get "Cleopatra's Cat" finished in time to send it in for evaluation.

Stitcher's Showcase

In April, Needle Artist's by the Sea EGA group had their 4th biannual needlework show. I entered three pieces and won for each. Whoopee!

 I received a 3rd place for my "White Queen" designed by Carolyn Webb. It was an EGA group correspondence course for pulled and drawn thread. I believe it's done on 28 count linen.

Here's a larger picture of the lower section so you can see some of the detail.

I took a 2nd for my "Fascination" designed by Marc Saastrad of The Silver Lining. It's stitched using one strand of floss over one thread on 25 count Summer Khaki lugana. Marc combines both the DMC and Anchor floss lines to gain a 700+ palette, so you MUST use his colors to get good results. I think this used about 80 colors from both DMC and Anchor. And that's for yellow, white, and green!

I won a 1st for "Angel of Cross Stitch" designed by Joan Elliot. She published the design on 1999 in the Cross Stitcher magazine to commemorate the 100th anniversary of DMC. The charts uses (I think) 391 DMC colors. By the time I got around to stitching it, DMC had added several colors so I couldn't say that it had all of them anymore. Why couldn't they have waited until I'd stitched my angel?! But really, it was fun and taught me not to fear rethreading my needle...a lot.


All three pieces were framed by Bob at Needles & Niceties in Upland, California. He did a wonderful job and I would recommend him for any heirloom quality framing jobs. In fact, the show judges kept praising "my" wonderful framing!

I am currently working on a myriad of little projects. As you can see from the items above, I LOVE BAPs (Big A** Project) but it's draining to stitch and stitch and stitch and rarely complete anything. However, with my smaller projects I'm stitching and stitching and stitching and getting the stitching done, but then I'm not finishing the project into it's final form! Sheesh! There is no pleasing me at all!