I like how this piece ended up looking! But it was a real pain to stitch.
My problems started with picking this pattern. I wanted to stitch a gift for my dad, so sent him a bunch of patterns that looked to be to his taste. He picked this one, and it wasn't until after I bought it that I noticed the problems. At first, everything looked a bit wonky. Looking more closely at the pattern there were a bunch of inconsistencies: the tile grid didn't always line up exactly, some things weren't symmetric, sometimes whole stitches were missing for no reason. On a whim, I searched for this image and found that it is based on this image from Shutterstock. This is the second time I've accidentally bought a pattern that is based on some other artist's stock image. I have no way to know if the pattern seller has a license that lets them sell this pattern, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I don't know how accepted making this kind of pattern for sale is - I'm curious what others think. However, I really didn't want to go back to my dad to pick another pattern, so I decided to plow ahead.
My next problem was that this had an unholy number of partial stitches. It seems like almost every stitch had at least one end that didn't fall on the grid. I decided that would be easier to do on evenweave than Aida, which was probably true, but had its own problems. This was my first blackwork on evenweave, which definitely required some learning to manage tension. This pattern also had a bunch of stitches that were 1/2 a stitch in length either vertically or horizontally, which have a tendency to get pulled behind the evenweave fibers, so I had to be really careful with those. I think I got everything to look okay with a combination of tension management and piercing my thread on intersections to hold it in place.
My other big problem was, as mentioned, there were a bunch of inconsistencies I felt I couldn't tolerate. A lot of boxes needed to be made a couple of stitches taller or shorter, which was ultimately not too hard to fix. Others, however, just looked plain weird. There were uneven scalloped borders, flowers with wonky petals, etc. I went a little crazy redesigning a lot of these until I liked the way the looked.
My one big positive of working on this pattern is that I had a lot of fun turning an all-black pattern into a colorful one. Shout out to this palette generator for helping me come up with the set of colors. Trying to pick colors that went with the design of each tile, keeping to a restricted number of colors for each tile, and balancing colors across the piece so there wasn't a huge concentration or lack of some particular color were all constraints that competed with each other. I like some of my choices better than others, and I think I got a little more colorful as I worked from top-left to bottom-right, but overall I'm happy where this ended up.
