Hungarian and Mosaic

For my second stitch, after the Straight Gobelin, I chose the Hungarian. It is a series of straight stitches of different sizes to achieve a patterned effect that's quite striking.

Because I had a problem with canvas coverage on the Straight Gobelin, I thought a bit on how to solve this problem before starting the Hungarian. My only thought was perhaps I needed additional strands of floss in order to ensure adequate coverage. My reading of "The Needlepoint Book" indicated this could definitely be done, and when I looked through the instructions of the kit I purchased, I noticed it devoted some space to how many strands of fiber are needed for specific stitches and fiber type. So I started the Hungarian with a 6-strand unstripped 18" length of floss and an additional 3 strands stripped from another 18" length -- a total of 9 strands.

For awhile I was pleased. I couldn't see any canvas and the stitching was, indeed, beautiful! However, inspecting it more closely when I finished, I couldn't help feel that it was a bit fuzzy, and the pattern was not quite as defined as in the picture in the book.

However, I went on to the Mosaic stitch, a diagonal multi-stitch pattern of squares. It also turned out quite nice but by this time I really felt that my plan to use 9 strands of floss was probably flawed. Again, the stitch pattern was fuzzy, and on the diagonal stitches I really couldn't see the definition. It was pretty muddy.

A further problem was that it was very difficult to get the needle through the canvas. So much so that the pads on my thumb and finger were quite sore and I often had to put quite a bit of muscle behind each stitch. I couldn't imagine that anyone would declare needlepoint "fun" with that kind of labor, so something was amiss.