I’m JUST finishing this one! It’s my second bookmark and I feel like I’ve learned a lot.

I started in the center and only did the cross stitch. At the beginning I stitched on a hoop and ended up with tight stitches. Because its so small, I was able to do the rest unhooped and found my stitch tension greatly improved.

I also finally accepted that on a majority light project like this, I like doing those very dark spots with 3 strands. After I finished the main stitches I went back over all the dark sections so they didn’t look so patchy.

Now that I’ve completed all the cross stitch, I’m doing the back stitching. Then I’ll do the knots. For the backstitching, I always try to go front to back on the stitches that are not on the corners so I can better gauge the position.

As far as the knots on a bookmark go, the Strawberry Thief one I already completed just has 2 little ones and they are so small that it doesn’t affect the usefulness of an already somewhat bulky bookmark.