Wednesday, July 25, 2012

DMC color project - Finished!


Oh, hello. Look what I finished! In case you've forgotten, the colors are stitched in numerical order.

I am SO happy it's done. I especially love the colors in the last six rows and the way they flow into each other. All rows except row five are stitched from left to right. I thought about going back and forth, but that made it much harder to stitch neatly. Plus, I don't think it would have added much visually.

To make this type of piece a square you must leave out 13 DMC colors. I left out the following colors: 
311, 350, 370, 602, 605, 611, 703, 731, 782, 825, 832, 840, 912

However I just left them out randomly as I went along, and I would alter a few of these choices if stitching it again. There are some duplicate DMC colors. The same color with two numbers. I know of three: 3326/776, 731/732, 3760/806. I'm not sure if there are more, though I contacted DMC about it today. The DMC labels list the other color in parentheses under the number, but it's not listed on the DMC shopper's checklist or color descriptions sheet (by they way, they have a really helpful website!).

EDIT:
I found out all the DMC duplicates and here they are --
504 = 3813
731 = 732
776 = 3326
781 = 782
806 = 3760
971 = 740
3773 = 407

In light of that I would leave out the following 13 colors if I were stitching this again:
407, 504, 731, 740, 776, 782, 825, 832, 912, 936, 3760, White, B5200

18 comments:

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    1. Thank you! I have a number of ideas for similar projects but using different layouts and breaking out of numerical order, so eventually there might be a fleet of these things.

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  2. Absolutely gorgeous and what a great idea!

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    1. Thank you! It's a really nice back-burner project for when you want to do some stitching but are too tired to read a pattern.

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    1. Thank you! I hope some more people try it, as it's a great break between more complicated/stressful projects.

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  4. I would really love to do this as I think it is a simple, but awesome project. Any pointers? What kind/size canvas did you use and how many threads per color do you recommend? Thanks

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    1. I did this on 18 ct. Aida with two threads of each color, that way each square was really entirely filled with none of the canvas showing through.

      One thing I found really helpful was to definitely do every row left to right, and to weave in the ends toward the left side (going by the front). When you weave them in leave enough tail that you can grab it and pull it tight, as it's really easy to loosen the last stitch of the square above when you're stitching the next row. Always going left to right helps with that too.

      I would always get out 15-20 colors, set them up in order next to me, and then put them aside (but not back in the box) when I was through with each. This made the project seem to go a little faster and helped me keep trade of where I was at. If you don't have all your color in numerical order (I have them by color but with each box in numerical order) then the color descriptions list on the DMC website comes in super helpful. It's at the bottom of this page: http://dmc-usa.com/Conversion-Charts.aspx

      And definitely write down the last color stitched when you're putting it away for a bit! It's not really *that* hard to figure out where you were, but much easier just to keep it written down. If you're leaving out the colors I suggest leaving out then I'd remove them from your storage containers before beginning. It's easy to get in the mode of "Look at the list, find the number, stitch the color..." and forget that list of which not to stitch (though probably many people don't mind having a not-perfect square).

      Good luck! I'd love to see a picture if you make one!

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    2. Thank you so much. It's amazing how a simple project can be really awesome. I am currently working on a challenging cross-stitch right now, but when I'm ready to tackle this I will definitely post a pic.

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  5. I love this - did - I have a project I stated with just my too long scraps from projects & kits and started something like this. I now need to get back to it.

    By the way did you do in number order - I wasn't clear on that.

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    1. thanks! Yes, I did stitch it in numerical order.

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  6. What a great idea... looks awesome!

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  7. How long did it take you to do this

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