Page 36 of Whispers is  finished, it felt like it took an age but I counted up around 14 stitching days which isn’t bad for a page with a lot of confetti in it.  I’d already nicknamed the page the ‘Bush of Doom’ so I was expecting it to take a little while.

I started the page working columns as I normally would but there were so many colours in the first block I decided I’d change things around a little.  I’ve been enjoying working one colour at a time on Into The Sea but that has lots of blocks of colour and very little in the way of a colour here and there so I thought I’d see how I coped using the same technique but for a busier page.

I started with the black, there wasn’t a huge amount of it but it was a colour that went through the entire page so I knew it would give me some good reference points for putting in the other colours.  Then I set to work hunting out one colour at a time.  I used EZPdf Reader on my IPad because that has a great search and highlight function that is great for finding symbols.  I can’t stitch off my IPad though because I like to have my chart on the fabric beside the area that I’m stitching and it’s just too heavy for that, so I have to copy all of the highlighted stitches onto my paper chart with a yellow highlighter, once the symbol is stitched I colour over the highlight using a different colour pen.  I reckon that the time it takes to copy the highlights onto my paper is less time than it would take me to look through the entire page hunting for the symbols myself and less chance of having those symbols hiding from me – there’s always one or two or six of them.

When I was about halfway through the page I had a good idea of which colours would fill in most of the page and I decided to leave those until last so that they would capture all of those carried threads much like I would do if I was parking the regular way.

I’m planning to stick to the one colour at a time for the next page which has a few bigger blocks but still a bit of bush to stitch, I may adapt it a little because there is a lot of black to stitch and it might be better to stitch a couple of lengths of black and then stitching one of the colours in the leafy bush parts at the bottom of the page.