many colors in project

Have you considered doing color phot enlargments of the design - on paper - to get the right size, and then trace onto the actual chair canvas?

You could certainly mix yarns - but generally it's a good idea to ply the yarn and then work with a group of the different colors put together. As in take a ply of 1 with 2 plies of another color to get a shading effect. It's actually a common technique to produce shading, graduating color. Example - say you have a 3 ply of dark red that you wish to shade towards a more orange color. First stitch with the 3 ply of red. Then switch after a bit to 2 plies red twisted with 1 ply of orange, then again to 1 ply red, 2 plies orange, and then to the 3 plies of orange. Brands mixed is fine. Be careful with mixing types (wool vs cotton vs wool-silk) because they will wear differently.

Sometimes. But, more common with NP is to use perle cotton as opposed to floss. Even in high count canvas you end up using a lot of floss. For something like chair covers I would steer away from cotton floss - as it will not wear well with the use that chair seats get. The wool will wear very well, and I don't think that you'll be happy with the stitching by combining wool and cotton together in the same length. You could mix in some cotton somewhere in the design. There are also rayon blends that are used a lot in NP (Burmalana & Needle Necessities make some ).

No, but you don't want them to wear out real quickly, either. You might want to check out the ANG website - there is a lot of information on NP stitching, stitches, and the like available. It may take some time to navigate around - but there is very good info.

Goodness, you're a brave one.

Butr that size hardly covers the chair seat. Has anyone done the

I'm assuming you would have complete coverage of the larger pieces of canvas with the smaller pieces. You might run into difficulty in places where two smaller pieces of canvas met. You could finish the edges so they did not poke out. Overlaps of two pieces of canvas are sometimes done but usually when a very large piece is being worked, such as a rug, where more than one piece of canvas must be used to complete the design and two layers are put together to be stitched as one. In such cases, the overlap would ideally occur in an area where the double layer of canvas (and consequent variation in height) would be less conspicuous, such as a border.

You would have to stay stitch the two pieces together, of course.

You might also have trouble upholstering because the fabric was too bulky.

I'd just treat the chart you've made like a graph and stitch it to the chart using it as a reference like a cross stitch chart. You could grid the canvas with a permanent marker (very lightly) or thread.

I agree with ellice that cotton probably wouldn't be suitable for something like a chair seat. Dora

I'd be more worried it isn't colourfast (assuming ink jet printer).

Tara

Pat Minors said

Jim (aka James) has converted several digital images into xs patterns. Next time I ask him to do that, I'll ask him to use less than the 90 colors he's used in the past. That number of colors is much more than I need for the type of embroidery I like to do.

This is my way of saying that unless you need fine details and shading, you could eliminate many shades of the same color.