Every full-coverage stitcher has their own particular way of doing things. If you were to ask five stitchers what is their preferred method for working full-coverage, there is a high chance you would receive five rather different answers. A few minutes spent on YouTube will show you many wonderful methods and teach you terms such as ‘parking’ or ‘extreme cross-country’.
I quite simply like to stitch one page at a time. The main reason I choose to stitch my full-coverage projects this way is because I get a great sense of achievement with the completion of each page and I simply adore the magic moment of placing the final few stitches in the page and seeing the image become suddenly so clear. The major drawback of stitching page by page, however, is that you may end up with visible page lines on your finished piece. There are steps that can be taken to avoid this, though, and I will talk about my preferred way of avoiding page lines a little later on in this post. 

What do I mean by stitching one ‘page’ at a time?

Large cross-stitch charts (and most full-coverage charts are very large indeed) are much too big to fit onto one piece of paper. Therefore, the chart divided up into sections and each section will be cover one piece of paper, or one page of a PDF document. When you get your chart- whether in physical form or PDF- you will usually find that the first page is cover image which shows either a mock-up or actual photograph of what the finished piece will look like; the second page will tell you the stitch-count of the piece and list the materials you will need to complete it; the remaining pages will be covered in portions of the chart and often will have little diagram telling you where the current page should be placed in relation to the others. The number of stitches on each page varies, but for the Paine Free Crafts chart I am using for my sample piece, each page is 50 stitches across (5 blocks of 10 x 10 stitches) and 70 stitches down (7 blocks of 10 x 10 stitches), so I will have to stitch 3,500 stitches to complete that page.
If you are using Pattern Keeper, you will find that the app will usually* place all the pages correctly and show you chart as one enormous chart which you can zoom in on as you please. You can then choose to have the page divide lines visible so you know where the borders of each page are. If you imagine printing out your chart and sticking all the pages of the chart together in the correct order, this is basically what Pattern Keeper is doing for you. 
*most full-coverage companies have made sure their charts are compatible with the Pattern Keeper app and will usually state that their charts are ‘Pattern Keeper friendly’. If you find that a full-coverage chart you have your eye on is not compatible with the app, you could always contact the company or designer and see if there is any possibility that the chart could be adapted to make it work with Pattern Keeper. 

Now that I have told you my reasons for stitching full-coverage page-by-page, I am going to outline my method for stitching. If you are following along with your own project, I am going to assume you have followed the steps in Part 1, and have your chart, fabric, thread and tools all ready to go. 

Step 1

When starting a new full-coverage project, I like to start with the page in the top left hand corner. In the post about calculating fabric size (which you can read here), I wrote about the importance of having a border around your stitched area too allow for framing. In this example I have decided my border shall be 4 inches all around, so I measure in 4 inches from the side and down 4 inches from the top and then hold my finger at the point where these two points meet. Because I am using gridded fabric, I want to make sure that the top left hand stitch of each block is placed on a part of the fabric where two grey lines intersect. This means I might now have to move my finger slightly to find the point where the very top left hand stitch of my project shall be stitched. Once I have found this point, I like to temporarily mark it with a needle or pin.

Step 2

I like to start each page of my full-coverage project by stitching the colour which is most plentiful on that page. The reason I do this is to create a sort of framework of stitches on the page from which all other stitches can be counted and placed. If using Pattern Keeper, you can do this by first reordering your thread list by number of stitches (the total number of stitches using that thread will be shown inside brackets beside the thread code) and then select the threads at top of that list (ie the ones with the most number of stitches in the piece overall). As you select each thread, little dots will appear showing you the stitches of that particular colour on each page. From there you can find the thread which is most used in the page you are currently working on. It is not guaranteed that the thread most used in the piece overall will be the thread most used on your current page, so I would advise selecting a few thread codes -one at a time- and seeing which seems to have the most stitches on your page. Once I have found the thread code with the most stitches on the page, I will find that thread, pull out a strand, double it over and thread my needle. I am now ready to place my first stitch. 

Step 3

By now I will have placed my fabric into it’s frame or hoop making sure that the entire stitched area of the first page is accessible and not too close to the edge of the hoop. To place my first stitch I find it’s position in relation to the point I have marked with my needle. Remember that each block on the fabric corresponds to one block on the chart so even if the first stitch in my chosen colour is not in that very first block, placing it correctly should not be too much of a challenge, using the grey lines on the fabric as a guide. I then place my first stitch in the correct space- using the loop-start method- and continue stitching with that thread until all stitches of that colour on the first page are completed. I may then move on to the second most commonly used thread on that page and do the same with that. However, if there were a lot of stitches of the first colour and I am happy that my page has a good framework of stitches, I will move onto the next step. 

Step 4

I then reorder the thread list in Pattern Keeper to numerical order and, starting with the smallest number of DMC, I complete all the stitches in each colour. The reason I like to work in numerical order is because I keep my threads for each project on Annie’s Keepers and sort them in numerical order. Even if there is only  a couple of stitches of a colour, because I created that initial framework of stitches, there should be no issue in placing the stitches as there will be stitches nearby to count from. 

Step 5

Once I have completed all the stitches on the page, I remove my fabric from the hoop, reposition it so that there is space to stitch page 2 and then repeat steps 2-4 again. 

Note: Even though I work page-by-page, if there is a case where there are a row of stitches of the same colour spread across two pages, I will always complete the row so that I am stitching some of the stitches on the neighbouring page. I like to do this so that the page breaks are not quite as defined and there are no visible page lines on the finished piece.