I'm well into the stitching on my Mystery Project. I've been forced to abandon some of my more ambitious ideas. Working on the fulled ground presents some problems, only some of which I anticipated.

First - there's the Fuzzy Texture problem. It's no so easy to transfer the design to be stitched onto a fuzzy, uneven ground. I started by drawing my design freehand on paper, then pricking and pouncing. That's the time-honored technique of taking a pin, a fork, or one of those spiked tracing wheel gizmos and piercing a paper pattern. While the modern equivalent uses a waxy equivalent of carbon paper behind the paper pattern, transferring its color to the substrate ground as it's pierced, the ancient method is slightly different. In the old way, once the paper was pierced, it was placed on the ground and finely crushed chalk (or charcoal, or another substance) was sprinkled on the pattern. The theory was that the fine dust would filter through the holes and mark the ground fabric. Once the ground fabric was marked the stitcher could make the design less likely to blow away by over-basting the chalked lines.

I do something similar. I prick the paper, lay it down on my cloth, then trace over the lines using a fat and crumbly piece of sidewalk chalk stolen from the kids. That leaves dots. Then I either stitch directly over the dotted lines, or baste over them so that they don't flutter or blot away ask I work. This works well enough, and seemed to be the best way transfer the design to my fulled surface. But it wasn't really perfect. The fuzz made the lines less than crisp, and I did a lot of eyeballing where design elements were to be as I went along.

The other problem posed by the surface texture was the loft of the fuzz. I did go back and re-wet my surface, whacking it down a bit to smooth it out, but even so - tufts of fuzz sometimes bloom between embroidery stitches. That's not the neatest look.

Second, there's the Substrate Structure problem. While the fulling looks nice and uniform on the surface, the original stitch construction is still very much present inside the fulled fabric. That means that it is very difficult to get neat, smooth edges on stitches that require them because in some cases the spot where a stitch needs to be made isn't dense enough to support the stitching. As a result, edges that cross knit stitch columns or rows tend to reveal the underlying structure as they deform around it. Satin stitch and the flavors of ground-cover type couching I wanted to use suffer from this ragged edge forced by fabric structure problem.

And third, there's the Ground Thickness problem I anticipated. The fulled fabric is thick and springy. It's not easy to pull a needle threaded with worsted through it (at least not in every spot). Therefore stitches have to "nip" the ground rather than fully penetrate it. This is annoying as the best effects and crispest edges are often associated with plunging the needle through the cloth perpendicular to its surface, rather than scooping up a bit on the end of the point.

To deal with these problems, I've retreated a bit. I've greatly simplified the design I'm attempting. I'm using a lot of stem and outline stitch, and a little bit of Romanian couching. I'm also using a little bit of a trellis style laid ground typical of Jacobean crewel work. For an idea of what I'm taking about, here's some else's pomegranate (although I'm doing the same fruit, mine looks quite different from this kit).