After a little over a year of stitching now I still feel like a bit of a noob, but I'm pretty comfortable with the basics. These parts of patterns still give me some problems though!
My strategy is usually to just do all of one color then move on to the next filling in the gaps as I go, but when it gets down to filling individual stitches surrounded by a bunch of finished stitches it gets quite cramped and sometimes those final stitches end up looking pretty rough.
Is there some really obvious method of doing this that I'm missing? Does anyone else use a different approach?
Blithely assume that no one else is going to notice the quality of any individual stitch unless it's so woefully bad that the issue is visible at arm's length?
Carefully choose the order in which you do colours to minimize the number of enclosed singletons?
Work with more than one colour and needle at a time, and get loose floss caught in other colours' stitches at the back?
If anyone has any better suggestions, I'm all ears.
I suspected multiple colors and needles going at once would be the answer as I've seen others do this before lol! I have tried that before and ended up stitching over the loose thread on the back and having to pull out a bunch of stitches to fix it so I kind of gave up on that... Maybe I just need more practice with it? Thanks for your response!
I'm currently working four colours simultaneously on my project, and am an expert at getting the loose floss caught, alas. Pulling it taut in a direction away from the area you're working in or wrapping it around something helps somewhat. It's basically a matter of trying (and often failing) to keep the slack out from under the current needle.
I'm just finishing up a big block of color and about to move on to another one of these difficult areas, so I'll try this tonight! Thanks again!