To Grid or Not To Grid - That Is The Question...

Oh brother, I'm paraphrasing Shakespeare - run for the hills!

Once I moved past my mourning period for Joyful Summer, I was able to focus on the Dragon for DH (you see - I made a deal with myself - no Dragon until I finished something. I picked my smallest WIP).

The first question I needed to address on a project this large, was whether I wanted to grid the fabric first or not. There are pros and cons to both gridding and not gridding. I suppose the largest con in my opinion is the huge amount of time it takes to do the gridding - only to take it all back out again. And yes, there are those that claim the time saved by using the gridding during the stitching process more than makes up for the time spent actually doing the gridding. I'm not sure I agree with them.

One can make the argument that gridding cuts down on counting errors. Anyone who has done cross-stitch for any amount of time will know that stitching errors are not a result of counting mistakes, but rather occur on their own time - for their own reasons. Running a line of thread through the fabric every 10 stitches won't stop the wanton glee a stitching error gets when it decides to rear it's ugly head.

Then there's the argument that gridding makes sure your design is centered on your fabric. This is true, and helpful if you want to start on the edge of the design. However, this argument doesn't hold water if you usually start in the center of the design. Being a center-starter myself, I don't tend to worry bout such things.

You can argue that gridding ensures you fairly quickly whether your fabric is large enough or not. However, being pretty adept at mathematics, I tend to trust my figures when working out fabric sizes.

So, after all this, how does it apply to the Dragon? Well, since this piece is a solid-stitch, I decided I wanted to start in a corner. I'm hoping to get all the background stitched first - leaving all the interesting bits for last - to spur me on.

So, I made the decision to grid the pages into my fabric. It won't take nearly as long, it will tell me pretty quickly if I have enough fabric or not and I'll know exactly where to start on the fabric for the corner.

And, after working on it all day Sunday, I got 5 lines in - of a 30 page pattern....yeah, this is going to take a while....what was my largest con to gridding again???