Metric Pansies
Here is my latest pansy in my SAL with Susie. It was a nice break from backstitching the Model “A,” and as with all of the other pansies on this piece, it stitched up pretty quickly (4 ½ hours). The weather here has turned cold and rainy, so it was refreshing to stitch a spring flower with lovely colors on such a gloomy day.
When I got this piece, I bought it as a kit that included the linen and on the package it claims that the linen is 14 threads per centimeter. By now I have lived in Europe long enough that I am used to the Metric system in my daily life and can actually use it quite well. However, I really hate it when I get Evenweave that gives me the fabric count in centimeters because I have not yet memorized what inch count is equal to what centimeter count.
I have a couple of pieces of 11 count per centimeter Evenweave and the only way that I could really figure out what count it was was to physically put my ruler on the fabric and count how many threads I had in an inch. It turns out that 11 count is more or less equal to 28 count.
Until today I had not actually used the ruler on the fabric that came with the pansy kit, but I thought that 14 threads per centimeter should be equal to 32 count. However, today it seemed to me that for 32 count the stitches in my pansies were kind of little.
Of course, I have been working on 14 count Aida cloth for the past few days and I do notice that whenever I work on 32 count after working on 14 or 28 count the stitches always look kind of small, but the stitches in my pansies just looked really small today for some reason.
Because the stitches looked so little I thought perhaps I was stitching on 36 count fabric instead of 32 count, so I decided it was time to get out my ruler. Honestly, it was no big deal to me if I was stitching on 32 or 36 count, but it started bothering me that I didn’t know for sure what size I was working on. So I measured and found out that apparently 14 threads per centimeter is more or less equivalent to 32 count.
I still think that those stitches look awfully tiny though… but then again, maybe I just need new contacts. 
6 November 2005 at 01:01
Looks great, Renee! And I bet the change of pace will make you feel like stitching even more!
6 November 2005 at 14:17
I don’t think you need new contacts.
Since 1 inch = 2.54 cm, you have to multiply the threads per cm by 2.5 to get the approximate count in inch. So 14 threads per cm should be 35 or 36 count.