I've been dipping my toes into the cross stitch pool lately, after an absence of more than a decade spent solely with needlepoint. To be frank, I never attained the mastery level of cross stitch to which so many of you belong, but I did produce some pieces which were pleasing to me and others.
I now want to produce pieces utilizing various cross stitch alphabet designs and favorite pithy phrases and maxims, and therein lies my problem. The use of graph paper to sketch designs seemed at first to be the right approach, but I find myself starting a design in pencil, only to realize fairly quickly that I misjudged the center of the first line of the design. I regroup and either erase or begin on another sheet of paper, and then, if I'm lucky enough to get the first line down, the next line presents the same problem as the first, with an additional problem thrown in for good measure - the distance from the first line to the second, which I nearly always misjudge. The erasing and starting over are maddening, and I'm not simply "eyeballing" the line centers and distances from one line to the next - I'm actually counting x's in each letter's design to correlate with the squares in the fabric.
Is there a less painful method of producing a design comprised of only words?
Betty in Georgia