Hi,
this is my first foray into the arts and crafts section of mumsnet. I normally exist in other areas.
I've had an idea for a carpet design in my head for a while, but it involves different heights of pile or different techniques to get the effect I would want - so a mix of latch hook with long and short pile and cross stitch and half cross. (I want clouds and persian style areas and dragons and a forest and a castle and especially to have the persian, cloud and landscape areas in different textures.) I haven't made a latch hook carpet in oooh 10 years, so I'm a bit rusty too. I do loads of cross stitch though.
I'm finally looking into doing drawing up my design and doing it, but wondered if anyone else has had a go at something similar already. One issue is that latch hook seems to mostly use 3hpi canvas and cross stitch 4 or 5 hpi. How difficult is it to use latch hook on the finer canvas, or how bare does it look with cross stitch / half cross on the coarser? I could of course buy some bits and do test pieces, but that's quite an investment as I don't have any leftovers to try stuff out on, so though I will do some testing, it would be handy to have some ideas of definite "no-no"s first. On that note, does anyone have any recommendations for suppliers?
I've got to actually work out my design to begin with too - anyone tried to do a rug design using cross stitch design software (which seems to be more readily available, and which I would also use for cross stitch designs in future)?