Irish Blessing Cross Stitch

Yesterday I managed to start and finish a beautiful, well known Irish Blessing. I've seen this on more complex charts, but I felt like stitching it in an easy format, so I created the chart myself at a site called stitchpoint.com. It's a wonderful place that makes it super easy to write any font and turn it into a cross stitch piece.

Here's my chart, but the cool thing is that you can make a chart out of any saying that you want. It took me just a little getting used to it, and some of the fonts are an upcharge, but the one I chose, which is called Monaco, was free, and it was just what I was looking for!

Feel free to use my chart if you'd like to stitch this:

One other bit of helpful information... When I stitch something using a dark thread on light fabric, I often can see the floss through the fabric. One thing I did to combat this is to spray paint my mounting board a dark color. It worked like a charm. The picture below shows the threads underneath...

Below is the board after I spray painted it. It didn't matter that the green paint was a different shade than the floss. It was close enough to hide the threads underneath...

And here's the same piece on the green background. You may notice that it's laying on my computer monitor, which is laying face-up on my desk. Basically I'm using it as a lightbox because I'm too cheap to buy one right now! But notice how you can no longer see the threads underneath.