Work moves on apace

No WIP picture at the moment (sorry, I know how you x-stitchers love them!) as I've already moved the stitching on the frame and I can't be doing with unrolling it again. Just over 1/4 of "When I Am Old I Shall Wear Purple" is complete and I have decided to use seed beads instead of French knots. Thanks to the lovely folk at the UK-cross-stitch Yahoo Group for their advice on that. Matching the colours was a total nightmare - it was only when I got to the shop that I realised the French knots were actually made up of two entirely different coloured strands, some are red-and-yellow and some are blue-and-yellow! Also it's very hard to choose bead colours when your small child is happily pulling everything off the rack at the same time (next time, she's going in the sling on my back!). K was very good otherwise, though, she was only going for the beads because she was bored. For a 14-month old to be so restrained in a shop where there's SO much at grab height is quite amazing.

So I've ended up with some orangey and some greenish beads; have chosen the "petite" Mill Hill beads as there seem to be millions of knots very close to each other. Just have to see what happens on that and whether it actually looks half-decent - otherwise J is either going to get "Big Girl Panties" or nothing! Actually I'm getting rather cross with this design as I've noticed a number of really obvious mistakes in the backstitch script - where the pattern is divided into four pages, they've put a three-square repeat in to help you find your position and match it up, but the repeat is only true for some lines. For others, there is no repeat at all, so if you didn't stitch what was in the repeat box, you'd end up with missing characters! So annoying; if you're going to the effort of doing a repeat at least get it right.

Still, it's an interesting piece to work on in that it's inspired me to do some design work of my own when I get chance - I'd like to do a Reiki sampler with the principles written out and a nice border. The trouble is, like all design work that I want to do (notoriously the front page of my Tarot site atm, the back end of which is coming on very well), I can see in my head how I want it to look. However, I just don't seem to be able to pull it into sharp focus and transfer that to the page (or screen). Have to sleep on it for a while yet, I guess.