Tag Archives: WIP

Milestones

Hello, dear readers. This month’s been a bit rough energy-wise and kept me from posting on schedule. I’m working on putting self-care first. I did manage to walk all the way around Lake Elizabeth on Monday! This was huge! I took the following pictures during my walk.

This little pine has the holiday spirit!This winter tree felt so serene. A gorgeous Japanese garden area. Tranquility. A fellow walker hangs an ornament on this impromptu community Christmas tree.

Then I tripped over my own shoes and sprained both my left wrist and ankle. Ouch! They’re healing well, but I’ll be unable to post as much. I’ll also be unable to cross stitch for a while. Happily, I finished most of page 2 and started on page 3. My favorite needlework store, Needle in a Haystack, is sending me two background colors I didn’t have enough of and I’m waiting for the package to make it through the holiday mail rush. I took a picture before I started page 3:

Chart page 2 (mostly) complete!

I think the sinuous red bit looks like a dragon. 🙂 When I’m finished I want to make a time- lapse “making of” video.

I also have a big milestone coming up. Last March I had a release done on my burn scars. I will have a second release surgery this coming year to give me more movement and less pain in my shoulder and elbow. I’ll post again when I know more. Naturally, this blog will be on hiatus while I heal.

WIP Wednesday

It’s been a joy to work with all these colors! It’s amazing to watch them seem to change depending on where they’re placed. For example, in that bit in the upper right corner that looks like a caparisoned elephant, there are two shades of brown, but they look purple!

The colors are a lot brighter in person. 🙂

The more I use the Floss-A-Way organization system, the more I love it. I don’t think I’ll use anything else now. I’d certainly have a big, tangled mess if I was using my previous system! The only problem I’ve found is that sometimes I think I’ve closed the ziplock baggies when I haven’t. With a little care, problem solved.

The Traveling Cross-Stitch Problem

You may know that knitting requires higher mathematics. Did you know that counted cross stitch also uses high-level math?

img_5644-e1511575594923.jpgI contemplated this when I noticed a familiar formula appear in my current project. Check out the white space in the photo to the right. To me it looks like 2Πr, the formula for deriving a circle’s circumference from its radius.

In counted cross stitch, needleworkers are constantly solving the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). The TSP is important to many industries that depend on logistics and performing complex routing, such as shipping, computer chip manufacturing, and even DNA sequencing. This problem asks, “Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city?” In cross stitch terms, “Given a chart with the location of stitches in color x and the distances between each pair of stitches, what is the most efficient route that uses the least amount of thread?”

This is an NP-hard problem, which means it’s rather difficult. And yet stitchers constantly solve it as they stitch, deciding how to use their thread most efficiently. Doesn’t that make you feel awesome, fellow crafters? 😎

I’ve completed 1/30th of my current project and am moving on to page 2 of the chart! It’s a bit dismaying to see how small it is on 25-count fabric, but I’ll keep trucking. Here’s a pic: IMG_5673

It looks more like a rectangle in real life. 🙂