I'm stumped and second guessing myself

I don't regret UFO'ing Suteki, I hated that project. But I can't stop thinking about it, athough not for the reasons you might think. It was confetti heavy and it was like stitching through carpet because of the color changes. Granted, it was during a time when I knotted the ends of my thread (I can be lazy that way sometimes and I still do it upon occasion, although I try to waste knot it at the front now). I was stitching her 1x1 on 28 ct Monaco (my fabric of choice). And I am a cross country stitcher by nature, which also doesn't help with heavily confetti'ed projects. I debated parking, but I'm just not built for those hanging threads.

The reason for the sudden obsession? The Aimee Stewart supersize max color Bookshelf that will be one of my new starts. It's going to be Suteki on steroids (and I have no plans to use any kind of knot, I can loop method one strand, I just don't like to, it takes too long). Back in the day when I did my first HAED and decided that 28ct was for me, I did try 25ct, but I didn't like the coverage for 1x1 (I have never been a fan of 2x1 and I'm still not...there's a story behind that too, of course). So, I've lived happily ever after in 28ct land 1x1 with the occasional foray back to 18ct 2x1, but I always complain about it while I'm doing it, even if I picked it for a reason (usually because 28ct is too small for the project or the design is too simple for the smaller fabric count). I watch FlossTubers who do 25ct 1x1 and their coverage looks fine, but I'm not seeing it close up. They are usually showing wide views (or they are stitching 2x1 tent, and I've already decided I'm not doing tent).

I need to interrupt this mini-panic moment for storytime. This week, I did everything I could to avoid Everest, although the why is a mystery. Maybe it was almost two weeks without stitching and I needed to retrain myself to the discipline of it all? I'm not sure. But I decided it might be better to change projects again because I literally put in 6 hours in a week (two actual days of stitching) and that's just horrible! It was here last week (which might seem sooner because last week's post was a bit late):

I was just so sick of all the blue! Blue in the sky, blue in the mountain, blue, blue, blue! Believe it or not, there are three colors of blue in that top part of the sky...you can't even tell! Even when I could get a brown or a purple in, it was for a brief amount of time, then back to the blue. No page finish, no real progress.

As my ADHD kept getting worse...back to my original thought. I started noticing the coverage on Everest (which is 28ct Monaco 1x1). It's a good coverage, exactly how I like it...here's a close up (and ignore my crappy stitching):

It's not too thick, there is no "carpeting", it's just the right amount of coverage, knotted back and all. Where you can see fabric poking through, once it's washed, those will disappear. But, I do actually have some 25ct chillin' in my fabric stash, it came with my Dollmaker kit from GeckoRouge (I just switched out her fabric for 28ct). So I got the bright idea to stitch up a block of different colors to see how bad it actually is (keep in mind, I did this test once back in 2010, but I figured maybe my tastes have changed or maybe my memory was skewing my view of the situation). I was using thread from Everest's stash which, ironically, is almost entirely made up of the knock-off thread I cleared out of my stash a few weeks ago. If it's faded, I can't really tell because it's all the same, but by golly does it shread really fast! I have to cut the strands very short or it will just tear apart after about 2/3 through. But anyway, here's my mock-up block on 25ct 1x1 (with a tiny little BamBam hair right there staring back, I thought about retaking the pic when I saw it, but it made me smile, so I left it in):

It's pretty much the same as I remember, pretty good with the lighter colors, but crap with the darker ones, especially the black. I should also add here that the 28ct of Everest is Monaco and the 25ct test is Lugana. In my experience, the holes in Lugana are bigger. Monaco is harder to get nowadays (and it's pretty much exclusively 28ct anyway) and the Easy Guide fabric I bought for the Bookshelf only comes in Lugana (even though it comes in various sizes, I bought it in 28ct for Bookshelf), so the holes will be bigger (which may negate this issue altogether and I'm, as per usual, getting bent out of shape for nothing). If I re-buy it in 25ct, I could go with Anchor black to solve the coverage issue, but it does create a couple more issues. First and foremost, it means I'm spending more money on a large fabric that isn't cheap (and more floss...21 skeins of Anchor black). I also couldn't get dowel rods longer than 48" locally for the new scroll rods I'm gonna make, which is fine for 28ct, but the fabric would need to be exactly 48" wide for 25ct, which makes them too short if I want a bit of hang-over of the rods, so I'd also have to order new dowel rods (and the next size up is 72"). Drilling in the house is one thing, but sawing too? I don't have an outdoor space to work in (let alone it's been 20 or below for two weeks now, with no change in that for the forseeable future) and I don't have an adequate vacuum to clean up sawdust. I am certainly not buying a new vacuum too!

I still have time before my February 29th start date to change all this out to 25ct, but the window is shrinking. I don't want to start on the 28ct and regret it because it turns to carpet, but I also don't want to rebuy it all for the 25ct and regret that as well if the coverage sucks. There is one FlossTuber I watch who starts big projects over and over again for various reasons (usually due to fabric and coverage) and I couldn't imagine doing that. I did it once with my Highlander Girl because it was my first full coverage and I didn't understand stitch lines if you stitched certain ways and it was pretty traumatic knowing I had to give up all that work (and it wasn't even a full page yet, let alone pages and pages of work like that FlossTuber does). I'm just not built that way nor do I have enough life left for that. She's young.

As for now, I'm trying to control my spending and trust my instinct to go with the 28ct. I have almost all of the bookshelf patterns (not quite all, but most of them), so if I do more than one, they will all need to be on the same fabric. Whichever one I pick first, needs to be the right one. I can't change later. Like the DoNa's, 18ct opalescent, each and every one. Someday, I will have a real house to hang the in, and they need to match. I am nothing if not a matchy-matchy kind of person.

But back to storytime (yes, the ADHD is strong), I did have to switch projects to keep myself stitching, so I did that on Sunday. I switched to Faces of Faery 167, a HAED by Jasmine Becket-Griffith. She's actually on 32ct 1x1 (a little experiment I'm still on the fence about). She's small, she'll only be 11x11 when she's finished. I have several other of the Faces series, so I'm not sure if I'll continue them on 32ct to keep the size consistent, or go back to 28. I'm not as strict on size for these as I am for some other projects. The bookshelves and the DoNa's are all the same size, the Faces vary. That helps with the decision. Plus, to be honest, in five years, I might not be able to stitch on 32ct as my eyesight gets worse than it already is. It's actually not that much smaller than 28ct, but it is smaller. And again, it's the "old" charting way for HAED, so there is no dithering, which means it's not "carpeting" up at all and that also helps with seeing it easily (some of the newer ones are dithered, which will make it harder to see as well, no chunks of continuous color). I left off on her here back in June of 2020:

I had trouble focusing Sunday, but I got a chunk done (although it's not my usual chunk and it just looks like more because she's so small). And, for the entire day, I only stitched 6 hours. That seems to be my new magical number. It's even hard to see what I got done on her because of the light colors and it was basically just fill in. Maybe I need to start on her face this week so next week you can see the progress as well:

As a bonus, the reason why I hate 2x1? I started stitching young, but they were young kids tiny kits. Teddy bears mainly. Back in those days, kits were all we had. I am older than the internet, remember? My first "real" kit was a Teresa Wentzler...yeah. I was 12! I had NO idea what I was in for. I don't know if any of you have done one of her projects, but tons of blended threads, half stitches, back stitches, french knots. I was WAY out of my depth. I was a one WIP pony at that point, and that kit took me through high school graduation, college, numerous jobs, marriage and separation before I finished it (although I would sometimes put it down for years and I apparently signed off on it with my married initials, so I wasn't quite divorced yet). This is a horrible picture of it and I think I've rematted it since, so I probably need to rephotograph it, but here it is:

There is a stain up by the dragon's neck that I never could get off. I have no clue what it was. I spilled tea on it at some point and half the fabric is "tea dyed" (or so I claim it when someone asks). It's supposed to be white Aida (I think 18ct, yet another reason to hate it). Ironically enough, I do have another Wentzler kit in my stash. I started it many many years ago (I was in my 20s), but I made a mistake and put it down. Haven't touched it since. It's 28ct, but it's 2x2 with some 1x1. I've never been good with 2x2 on a higher fabric, let alone mixing the two. I already intimidated myself enough by my initial experience, so between the mistake and the future issues this project could throw up, I've gotten too scared to touch it again. This one makes the other one look like child's play (what I would consider a Chatelaine on steroids with a dose of heroin). I started in the middle on it (which is what I used to do back in the day), but it all needs to be frogged before I even think about restarting this (which I can't imagine doing again unless I go crazy or something or someone offers me a million dollars to do it, and even then I might ask for 10 million). If this were a full coverage HAED, I'd be all over it in no time! This is it:

I had actually given away a bunch of kits to a co-worker at one point and panicked. I did the unthinkable and asked for some of them back, this being one of them. I'm still not sure why. I've never been good with letting go of things, but those of you who have been around for a long time, know the reasons behind that. It was a horrible thing to do, I'm aware of that, but I just couldn't help myself. I really shouldn't act on rash decisions! If I were smart, I'd sell the Disney Kinkade kits rotting away in my stash. I'm NEVER gonna stitch them, the detail is horrible and they have all those specialty stitches I hate, I was only buying them as "collectibles", and I never got Rapunzel (the last one before the company went belly-up). They go for several hundred on eBay now. I could get several thousand for the whole set. But, as with everything else, I can't part with them. That's for dealing with after I'm dead I guess.

So, I guess that's it for this week. This wasn't supposed to be a long post, but none of them ever are! I'm just a very verbose person in writing. I really should write a book someday! I'm more of a storyteller than a speaker or a "quippy" person. If you guys have any first-hand experience with those bookshelves or 28ct vs 25ct, let me know (but I know most of you guys don't work on those types of projects). I do so prefer the one-on-one relationships we have here versus what happens on YouTube. I still hate commenting over there. And I'm on Instagram, but I'm bad about posting a pic and forgetting it. I rarely respond to comments because I have notifications turned off (I have notifications on almost all apps turned off, I hate my phone pinging every two seconds), and I don't catch them until the next time I post a pic, which might be in a couple of weeks. I'm just not good with social media.