Waste Canvas is not a Waste of Time

I'm still working on my wall hanging; to be specific I'm on the hand embroidery part. It's fun to try different techniques and throw in a few beads here and there.

To combine the hand embroidery with my quest for better precision, I have a couple options: 1. mark on my wall hanging with chalk or water soluble pen or 2. waste canvas. hhmmm...waste canvas? I've never used that before. With my 40% off coupon for the big box store in my hot little hand, I think; 'what the heck'?

I read about this product in Bead Embroidery Stitch Samples by Yasuko Endo. The thought is that by having the rows and columns available to stitch on, I'd have a product like I was used to working with years ago when I'd cross stitch.

I opened the package and found a very stiff product (now I know why it's called canvas!). I cut a piece the right size for the area I wanted to embroider. Around the perimeter I loosely stitched the canvas on. It was a piece of cake to do.

Then it was time to add my embroidery. I chose a nice geometric which would give me a good opportunity to try out the advantage of neat rows and columns. Yasuko recommended making the stitches a bit tighter because the waste canvas will be removed. 

See how nice my stitching is? It's much more even than I could have done without the canvas.

Once you're done embroidering, you just need to give it a bit of spritz with water. 

Now the strands of the canvas loosen up and can be removed. Oh, about the removal, I was careful to pull the strands out thread by thread. First I pulled out the horizontal threads and then the vertical ones. Using tweezers or something that gives you a good grip on the threads doesn't hurt.

Here's my finished product. You'll see that I forgot to add one vertical stitch, but that'll be easy enough to fix:

It helped me be precise with even spacing. I really enjoyed the ease of using the product and look forward to using it more on my wall hanging. Woo hoo!