Coming to Life - New project

As the titles says already, I started a new big project. It was very tempting to start or the Holland Landscape Mandala - which is fully kitted up - or preparing to start the Cuban Mansion Mandala. But I decided to own up to my promise and to stitch "Coming to Life". Michael likes this one heaps and so I will stitch it for him. Doing it on 18 ct Aida - which feels a bit weird. I prefer to stitch on linen or evenweave.

First time ever I used a pen for gridding. Most often I skip the gridding because it's not only heaps of work but also because I have troubles to remove the thread OR it annoys me doing that while stitching. But I saw some while ago a nifty way of gridding and got myself a water erasable fabric maker with a fine tip. And it works great. The slightest bit of water removes the color...and it doesn't come back. I tried it for 2 weeks - and even touching the lines with a damp cloth does the trick. Personally I wouldn't use this if I would stitch with any hand dyed fiber or on not color fast fabric...but for stitching on white with DMC it's ideal. When I stitch these "paintings" I don't stay in a 10x10 square (although I concentrate on one for finishing) but move out of it to finish off the thread in the needle - as far as possible. Gridding helps a lot here. And best thing is, it took me only couple of minutes to grid it. Just a ruler and off you go. I love it.

The only thing that bothers me a bit is that I can't figure out who the artist is. I bought that chart on Ebay 18 months ago. It was a case of browsing, and accidentally coming across it, and falling in love. Auction was almost running out - so I bought it immediately. The chart itself is not of the quality I would have liked and it comes with surprisingly little information. I even needed to grid the chart itself - the original is just a huge bunch of numbers without any gridding lines. Very hard to work from.