I finished page 18 on October 6, 2022. Shortly thereafter, I found out we had company coming, so I took a short break from stitching in order to give the house a thorough cleaning. Then our youngest turned 17, and we threw him a party. 😀
I didn’t get back to stitching until the 22nd of October. I stitched some, but not every day. World of Warcraft released a new expansion in November, and by then I was experiencing pain in *both* thumbs and wrists. I dropped the stitching and played as much WoW as my hands would allow so I would be ready to raid come December.
I was able to raid by the start date, but my hands were in rough shape. I had to wear braces on both hands. By Christmas, I was barely able to hold my cell phone! I broke down and went to the doctor’s office. The nurse practitioner gave me something to reduce the swelling and relieve the pain, and I went back in just after New Years for shots in my wrists.
I’m doing much better now! I only play WoW 3 or 4 days a week (maybe 2-4 hours on each of those days) and in the past couple weeks I’ve actually been able to stitch. I can stitch for 1-2 hours each day, instead of the 6-10 hours I used to do, and I’m not stitching every day. But hey! At least I’m stitching!!
In early December, my stitching app had a huge update. Now we are not limited to seeing only one page at a time…we can see the whole chart at a glance! There were several other changes at the same time, but this is the one that had the most impact on me.
This is what we were restricted to previously: one full page of symbols (with the option to zoom in). It was a bit frustrating because the colors don’t simply stop because the page does…and if you stitch each row to the very edge, you run the risk of have a seam in your stitching. In order to keep this from happening, I would stitch all the way to the edge on some rows, and stop a bit short on others. When I stitched the adjoining page, I would fill in the spots I skipped. Kind of like a zipper, if you will. If you look at the above picture, you can see there are three grayed out columns on the left and three grayed out rows at the top. The grayed out symbols are an overlap from the bordering pages so you can align your new stitches properly (and fill in the blanks if necessary).
In this new picture, you actually see bits of four pages! This is part of Markup R-XP’s big update. In full chart mode, you can zoom in to see the symbols more clearly. The heavy dotted lines mark the page edges. You can see where I’ve left some stitches blank on the otherwise filled in areas. Now that I have the update, when I get near the right edge or bottom of the page, I can easily see which stitches are in both of the adjacent pages so I can stitch them together in order to create a seamless transition from page to page.
This picture is Full Chart Mode, zoomed out. Amazing, right? I love seeing how far I have come on this project. This was my progress as of December 8, 2022. Compare the above photo to the one below, which shows where I am as of February 6, 2023:
Not exactly an impressive change, but considering two months ago I could not hold a needle tight enough to stab fabric…