Stitch Guides From Your Favorite Guide Writers

Bristly Thistle has added a new section to their website--a section that eventually will list stitch guides from your favorite stitch guide writers.  There's nothing listed yet, but that's just a matter of time!
http://www.bristlythistle.com/sg.html

Red Geisha, Large and Small

Small Version of Red Geisha as Purse Front

Melissa Shirley has three sizes of the Red Geisha pattern.  I wrote a stitch guide for the smaller piece (seen above as a Stirling bag insert) which will work as well for the larger pieces although you'll need more threads.  It's a lovely piece, and perfectly Asian!
http://bestitchedneedlepoint.com/melissa-shirley-geisha-girl/

http://melissashirleydesigns.com/gallery/index.cgi?index=1306797143_12127&col=&cat=27

Mellissa Shirley and the Crackers

If you read The Chilly Hollow Needlepoint Adventure religiously, you know that Melissa Shirley is a good stitcher as well as being the creator of one of the most popular lines of painted canvases today.  Melissa herself has stitched the golden Christmas cracker series that shops will be offering soon.
http://needlepointstudyhall.blogspot.com/2012/07/golden-christmas-crackers-by-melissa.html

Robin King is collaborating on her to create the stitch guides. You know how great Robin's guides are for her own stitching, right?    Melissa + Robin + Christmas is bound to equal a wonderful stitching experience.

Barbara Bergsten is My Hero UPDATED

Quite a few stitch guide writers use Macs and many of them have been using Canvas X as their graphics program--you know, the nifty program that draws diagrams of stitches.  However, ACD Systems is no longer updating their Canvas X system for Macs, only for PCs. You can't even buy a copy of Canvas X any more.  (I know, I've been trying for over a year!)  To compound the problem, now that Apple has introduced the new Lion software, Canvas X won't work for an updated or new system.  This means that stitch guide writers who use Macs and Canvas X are up the creek without a paddle.

Some folks are sticking with the out-of-date Snow Leopard operating system so they can continue to use Canvas X.  Some folks have used specialty software to run PC programs on their Macs so that they can use some of the many graphing programs written for PCs.  Some folks are thinking of partitioning their hard drives and running Snow Leopard and Canvas X on one part of their system while running Lion on another part.  Some are even considering investing time and money in Adobe's Illustrator or maybe buying a cheap PC to run PC graphics software on.   All of these are less than desirable solutions.

But Barbara Bergsten has come to the rescue with a way to use Pages (the Macintosh word processing program) to graph stitches.  Here's what Barbara and her Apple tutor worked out--
http://createneedlepoint.typepad.com/create_needlepoint/2012/07/steps-to-make-a-needlepoint-stitch-diagram-in-pages.html

This is very good news indeed for people with Macs who can no longer use Canvas X.  Thanks, Barbara!


UPDATE:  Here are two examples of a PC stitch diagram and a Mac stitch diagram so you can see the difference and help Jan decide if the one done in Pages is up to snuff.
http://threadmedley.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/which-would-you-prefer/