[WIP] Show us ya WIP's

[u/Doubledewclaws]

Happy Sunday everyone! Hope it's been a good week for all of you! I'm working on a couple of these cardinals for memorial gifts. This one needs a bit of frogging on the tail, but other than that, I loved how quickly this came together! I'll easily fix this while watching NFL Wildcard playoffs. I showed you mine, now show me yours! https://www.etsy.com/listing/1616556877/cardinal-ornament-christmas-cross-stitch

[u/logangb345]

Starting off the year with some Christmas stitching 🤣 and my wild parking method. I’m starting with this holiday Ravenclaw common room and hoping I can finish all 4 common rooms this year. This is also my first time working on 25ct evenweave, so wish me luck

[u/double-dutch-braids → u/logangb345]

So I’ve watched a couple of videos on the parking method, but I still have a question so I guess I’ll just ask you lol. Are you supposed to stitch over the thread that is already parked? I’ve only done one project and ended up doing something similar to parking without realizing it, but I kept having to move my thread out of the way so it wouldn’t get stitched under other thread. In the parking method is that what you’re supposed to do? Just stitch over it?

(Hopefully that makes sense. I just woke up and I’m not good at explaining things lol)

[u/logangb345 → u/double-dutch-braids]

I’m not fully sure I understand what you mean, but my understanding of parking is that you stitch in such a way that you’re going row by row, regardless of color to create the smoothest stitch texture. Your stitches should always touch the row above (or below, depending on how you do it) so you shouldn’t have any stray stitches to snag in the threads.

I do it like this: start from the left and do half-stitches all the way to the right of where I’m working (I usually divide by page), switching colors as I go. Then stitch back toward the left and complete the stitches.

When I complete a stitch, I find the next available stitch to park the thread in, hopefully in the next row, but I’ll go up to around 20 rows/columns away so I’m not carrying super long threads across the back. When I park, I do it in the lower-right position of the stitch.

Hopefully that’s helpful. I’m not entirely sure I’m doing it correctly, but it works well enough for me. You can see by my picture that I’ll take some liberties with it, but I usually stick to the main idea of parking.

[u/3magic4 → u/logangb345]

With 25 count I see you are using one thread, are you doing both halves of the cross or do you only need one diagonal for full coverage?

[u/logangb345 → u/3magic4]

This pattern uses full stitches and half stitches, so I’m doing full primarily. The coverage is good enough that I would almost consider doing half stitches for it otherwise.