Day 328: It's time to change screens again, which is to say the embroidery hoop has to be moved to a fresh section of canvas so I can work on the next part of the design. As arthritis makes holding a hoop more painful as I age, I seldom use one larger than seven inches. I've tried various types of stand, but all of them have one major drawback in that it is never easy to change colours. When you're working on something as detailed as this, you have to do that a lot. With a hand-held hoop, it's simply a matter of flipping it over, finishing off the current colour and attaching a new one. With a stand, you have to remove it from whatever type of clamp holds the hoop or alternately, loosen the clamp, reverse the work, add the new colour, turn the work rightside-up again and then retighten the mechanism. Or I suppose you could get out of your chair, get down on your knees and approach the solution from the underside if you were truly a glutton for punishment. None of these methods works for me. With the advent of computer-generated patterns, colour changes after three or four stitches are more common (sometimes they will be the only stitches of that colour in the design), but on several occasions, a kit has shown only one stitch...one lousy stitch!...of a different colour. Yep, it's times like those that I much prefer a hand-held hoop. And no, using an established colour instead is not something I would ever consider. Another thing: I'd like to take a sledgehammer to whatever program tells you to do backstitch in black over black cross-stitches. Technology was supposed to make our lives easier, not give us more nonessential work to do.
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