My favorite designers

Barbara & Cheryl, http://www.stitching.com/bar-cher/: -stunning- charts, with lots of gorgeous detail (but not too hard to stitch), true to life ("life" being my hometown, Charleston, SC)

I'm in the middle of their Charleston Sampler, for my mother.

A recent piece (9 December 1995)

This is a motif from a chart in Cross Stitch Sampler magazine, Feb. 1995, cover piece, chart pgs. 42-43. Design by Mike Vickery. © NKS Publishing, 1995.

It was stitched over 2 on 28-count dove-grey linen, mostly using #26 Piecemaker's needles, all DMC floss, no specialty fibers, as part of a round robin.

Here's the back of said piece, for weirdos like myself (hi, Susan!) who always check out the back first. The unbelievably neat backstitching is really a double-running stitch. Whee!

For a small piece with 26 colors (gasp!), the back is remarkably neat. IMO, anyway. (And, no, I didn't clean it up in Photoshop---my Photoshop skills are rudimentary, at best, pretty much limited to scanning and cropping.)

There were over a dozen errors in the chart for this piece. Grrr.
Throw tomatoes at piglet@panix.com.