Charting the Little Draba Plant

After refining my initial chart of the Draba, I skipped Gerda’s step of tracing just the outline of the squares without the grid, a step which makes any further errors more obvious.  Instead, I resorted to a tool Gerda didn’t have.

Years ago, I bought and downloaded a cross-stitch design program.  It’s pretty basic and has some definite idiosyncracies, but it makes converting a basic chart into something that actually has symbols for the colors neatly drawn fairly easy.  It doesn’t do the charting for you, just lets you put your ideas into a readable format, without your having to hand-draw every single symbol in every square.

I chose colors that I thought would look good (more about Gerda’s palette in an upcoming post) and clicked my way through putting my quick little chart into the program.

 

 

And this is what the chart looks like!

It already looks more Gerda-ish, because it doesn’t have the areas of color outlined.

But what would it look like stitched up?

At this point, I have to admit that I’m pretty impatient.  I want to see this in cross stitch NOW, and I know that this is, for me, more than a quick evening’s work.  Augh!  Am I on the right track or not?

 

 

 

 

My cross stitch program has one other feature.  It lets you look at the work as it would appear stitched on Aida fabric.  It’s not a perfect preview, because only a few colors of “fabric” are available.  The rendering of the weave of the fabric is distracting.  Worst of all, the thread colors are not  a good match for DMC thread.  Still, it’s a quick and dirty way of judging whether the overall design is balanced and pleasing.

Thus, this is a guesstimate of an approximation of a suggestion of what my design would look like stitched on chunky yellow Aida instead of lovely, ivory-colored linen or evenweave, and if the stems were done in black and not in green.

I am…  Optimistic.  What do you think?  Does it say “Gerda Bengtsson was here?”  Let me know in the comments!