What I wish I'd known before my first water embroidery piece

I did a Lake Superior piece last winter and my first attempt at the open water looked like a parking lot. I had gone the other way on thread count, using all six strands because I thought fewer passes meant faster progress, and the whole surface went stiff and shiny. Ripping it out took longer than stitching it. Once I dropped to a single strand things loosened up and the fabric showed through just enought to keep it from looking solid. Where I differ from you is on the wave crests. I got better results with a row of tiny split stitches in a pale green-blue than with any knot work. My knots kept migrating to one side of the line and it read as noise rather than spray. On the second attempt I leaned on the direction trick instead, angling every row toward a point off the edge of the hoop, and suddenly the water had a current.

The pencil line thing is painfully familiar. I traced my swells in regular graphite and by the time I noticed the shadow under the pale threads I was four inches in. Used a blue water-erasable marker on the fix-up and even then I did a test patch first because my fabric bled a little. One thing I would add: stitch a small sample of your water on the margin of the fabric before committing to the main area. Ten minutes of testing saved my second attempt.

Back in the day we didn't have erasable markers, we used tailor's chalk or the old pounce method, powdered chalk rubbed through a pricked pattern. Faint dust wipes off with a clean brush and never ghosts through your thread. I still do it that way on anything pale. For surf I'll also throw in couching, lay a pale thread down and tack it in little uneven bites, gives you foam ridges you can't get with knots. Works lovely in wool over cotton too, though that's a whole other rabbit hole.

One trick that helped me spot direction errors before they got stitched in: I photograph the traced fabric and flip the image horizontally. For some reason a mirrored view makes an off-angle row jump out immediately, something about the brain reading it as unfamiliar. I caught three rows angling the wrong way on a river scene that way, wich would have been miserable to pick out later. Also, on the question of cast-on stitch, does anyone find it packs tighter than expected and pulls the fabric? I had to loosen my hoop twice mid-row or the whole wave started cupping.