Waste canvas experiment - current progress

I've been wanting to do the Egyptian Garden by Chateliene on silk, which means using waste canvas. Well, I decided that maybe I ought to test this idea out before starting, so I started an 8" piece of one of the butterflies from

'm altering it to have one section that is over-one and another thatis beaded. The over-two at 16-count is going well, so I know thatwill work, but the over-one has proven to be a bit of a bear. What I have found so far is: Waste canvas doesn't like scroll bars, so you have to set it up flat (like you would with goldwork, etc.). Get the type of waste canvas that uses very fine threads, and if the pattern has over-one sections, get the type with double threads. Trying to do full crosses in the over-one section doesn't work

- you wind up splitting the threads and you can't see where to put the needle on the second leg of the cross. Do the over-one section in half-crosses. If you split a thread on the waste canvas you will never get that thread out w/o a fight. And the fight shows. To fix a stitching error, you will have to unthread the needle and remove the stitches that way, you cannot "unstitch".

Since using waste canvas work best when the piece is not on a scroll frame, I looked into slate frames. Gaack! They are just a tad bit pricey .......

While I was looking into them I noticed something - several use wooden dowels on the vertical to stitch the fabric to. Hmmmm... I wonder... The size of Martina's pattern is 19" X 19". I think if I take the size of the pattern, add 1.5 inches on each side for the size of the silk fabric, attach the silk to an unbleached muslim fabric and use that to wrap around the dowels and then stitch that to stretcher bars, I might be able to keep the final size, frame and all, to 27" X 27". That's a bit large, and it will be hard to get to the middle, considering I'm only 5'2" and have correspondingly short arms, but I think I can do this.