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Enjoy your travels to see family! Smokey has been napping during my videos lately and not interested in being disturbed. I'll keep trying to get her to join me, though!

Oh, that's too bad! I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for letting me know. I have this one and a different one with these specialty stitches, but I'll probably avoid buying anything else from them.

Yes! It reminds me of that, too!

When stitching full coverage, I will definitely carry my thread to new areas, as long as it's not too much more than 1 inch away. I want to be careful with my tension when I carry, so I don't go too far, but the threads will be stitched over, so it's okay. On my Cats and Heart and anything that's not full coverage, I do try to avoid carrying thread too far across unstitched fabric. Sometimes I will if it's just a single stitch here and there with light floss, like snowflakes or something. But if I can, I will try to run my thread along areas that will eventually get stitched over - like in that wallpaper section on the April Cats & Hearts. There was a more straightforward place to carry my thread for some of the colors, but it would have meant carrying thread through an area that would not be stitched over, so I adjusted my tactic and kept the carrying to areas that would be covered up. If something is only 2-3 stitches away, a trick to help keep a carried thread from showing is to make sure it is laying on an angle, then it won't show through the holes, so if I can do that I will. If stitching letters, I will usually carry from letter to letter, but cut off and restart between words (unless it's tiny words that are close together).

When I use a length of fancy floss (hand dyed thread), it will often come in pre-cut 1 yard lengths. Since a skein of DMC is 8.7 yards, your method will result in very similar lengths to that. However, when I cut DMC off of my bobbins, I have settled on unwinding 4 feet of thread and I'll either do a loop start for 2 strands or cut 1 strand of it in half for a 1 strand project, so that I'm working with a length that is 2 feet long.

@@StitchinMommy Thank you!!!

You're welcome! I had fun pulling it out again!

I stitch from a master set of DMC, so I don't have all my full coverages kitted up separately. That would indeed be a huge investment of resources. Since for me, it's all about the journey and most of my full coverages don't need to be finished, it wouldn't make sense to earmark resources for them for years on end when they could be used for other things. So, I just need the pattern and fabric and I'm good to go. I also stitch many of them on higher counts, so the pieces of fabric don't need to be very big.

The tension was a bit tricky on the very large swirls, but generally it wasn't too bad because I was using congress cloth, which is a canvas. It's very stiff and doesn't pull like fabric would. However, I am considering redoing this design at some point on a smaller count, and I would definitely need to put it in a hoop if stitching it on fabric. :)