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I have a question concerning what to use for gridding.
I got some Sulky Metall thread and used this to grid my HAED, but it really takes ages to do for only 1 page.
I saw a lot of people using this blue water soluble pen to grid. It says you have to wash it out in 30 days. But doing the HEAD will definitely take a lot more time. Will the colour not come out later than 1 month?
Did anyone tried this?

I use the Mark-B-Gone pen for gridding and have never had any trouble washing it out. And that's been after way more than 30 days. I'm pretty sure I have also used the Clover pen also. I have gotten these at WalMart or Michael's. I grid one page at a time with a few extra columns and rows since I cross country stitch and grid all my HAEDs. I don't have the patience to grid the whole piece. Besides I find that rather than the ink not washing out it tends to fade away on its own sometimes. Hope this helps.

Carole

I use the clover water soluble pen. it works fine and it does wash out if left in longer. I marked a piece of fabric and left it for 3 months, then washed it out. it came out just fine.

Exactly what is gridding ?

Where you go over the fabric to mark out every 10th stitch vertically and horizontally.

This can be done with a washable marker pen (not a pencil as the graphite gets in the fabric & stays) or thread of some sort. If you use thread, it can be coloured nylon monofilament, metallic thread or a slightly contrasting colour cotton. I have never tried nylon or metallic threads myself, so cannot comment further on them. If you use cotton, make sure you snip it away just before stitching the crosses that cover where the gridding goes, as the needle can pierce the cotton gridding thread and it'll be there forever (been there, done that, regretted it!). Also, with the cotton, the colour should be fairly close to the fabric colour else any fluff from the gridding will show up like a sore thumb.

Sometimes with gridding you can get away with just marking the plan page boundaries and picture boundary (which is what I do on Aida).

Hope that helps,

Richard

Thanks! I've been stitching many years, never thought to do that!

I usually grid at minimum the page outlines and center lines. Then I decide how much more I want to grid beyond that. I may decide that I can go without gridding individual blocks, or I may then grid just afew pages at a time so I can get on with stitching. There's always down time when I'm too distracted to stitch because I'm watching something on TV that needs more of my attention, so I don't want to deal with parking. That's an ideal time to do another page of gridding however. Just make sure you double and triple check your counting!