I have been working on my cat tapestry. I managed to add 6 and half rows over the 10 hour period. I had a couple of particularly slow nights where I felt foggy and sluggish. My dad's birthday took place during the week I worked on this, but as he passed away in December, I felt kind of morose and melancholy for days. It was a bit of therapy to concentrate on the intricacies of this pattern and just let myself be calm.
In the photo below, I can imagine that the dangling threads and needles looks disconcertingly messy but I'm following the technique as described by a French teacher, whose book I've read. I've referred to it here. I actually am thrilled now with this method. The challenge of this particular tapestry is all the colour changes and that is solved by threading up many needles, storing them in a needle-store-device-thingy, following the chart closely and, then, after the one or two stitches in a particular colour, I then park the needle and wool, letting it dangle, until I return on the next row. It's way easier than trying to follow the chart and work in one colour at a time - given there are over 40 colours in this tapestry and lots and lots of colour changes.
Aldo's head is beginning to take shape. Two little pink ears and then a bit of black and tabby joining up the ears.
Someone from my tapestry class enlarges her charts on the photocopier and so I took a leaf out of her book and am glad I did. I ended up with 4 x A4 photocopies for the one chart but it is much easier to follow the colour change. I also mark the row I am up to with the orange coloured sticky tape that is like post-it notes - sort of a reusable sticky tape. I've described this in another chart-related post.
This final image is of my general tapestry-related clutter (including the mostly finished block of Haigh's chocolate) that accompanies my tapestry work station. If you're interested, the threaded up needle-storage-device-thingy is at the back of the table. And, for anyone familiar with Amy Karol's bend the rules sewing book, the bag I store this tapestries' bits and bobs in, was sent to me as part of a bend the rules sewing swap way back in 2008. The woman who made me the bag knew I liked gardening and funnily enough was an expat-Aussie living in America. I used to use it for painting and drawing supplies which was a nice idea but somewhat misguided, as we don't draw or paint very often. I am now making much better use of her (my) bag. Next 10 hour project is the one I call the Brown Owls project - at the moment it's the celtic cross stitch.
