A Bluestocking Knits

The "Japanese View" cross-stitch is completed, partly-blocked, and ready for framing!

The chart is by Irina Neskorodeeva and is available free at Smart Cross Stitch.  It is actually quite polished for a free chart — I don't mean to sound snobbish, mind, but it is complex and clearly has had a good deal of thought and effort put into it, so was a generous contribution to the free-charts library by the designer.

I did make a few tweaks — as I said before, I like the more-solid look of full cross stitch, so the mountains and "sky" here are not in half-cross as in the original.  I have used partial stitches in the past, and so I wondered why they aren't used here, to smooth out the stair-step edges on the many curves.  I did blend the colors at the upper edge of the peak on the far left, just by going over the color-change with a single thread of the darker color, which made it flow a little better, to my eye.  There was a slightly-harsh straight line across the "sky" where the palest-pink is, which was probably more apparent in my full-cross than it would have been in half-cross, and so I just skipped a few stitches in a sort of programmed-random manner, fewer and fewer through the four or five rows as I went upwards.  

I confess I had a terrible time keeping on track in all parts of the sky, partly mistaking which small "panel" I was on, and partly just miscounting, and so the blending isn't quite what was intended, but luckily the shading is particularly effective either way.  I wasn't quite happy with my French knots, either, which seemed to have a mind of their own and never wanted to lean in the direction I thought they would go, so that the effect isn't quite what it is in the original, but there it is.

And because I clearly crave more than one needlework project going at the same time! —