I have always wanted to learn Japanese embroidery. It’s so beautiful and I love the colors so much. However, I’m almost certainly doomed to failure in this for many reasons: 1. I have dry skin and always have rough cuticles — bad on silk 2. I am terrified of sharp needles — I even sew on buttons with tapestry needles & who does that. 3. I’m a leftie and so the twist in many silks becomes untwisted when I stitch. Oh well, at least I can admire from afar
Monthly Archive:: February 2007
Yesterday someone asked on a mailing list I’m on about what needed to be considered when you wanted to cross stitch or needlepoint a building. Since that is really fun to do and since you might want to move beyond stitching your own home, I thought I would share with you some of what I’ve discovered on this. I did some research on this awhile ago and it turns out to be more complex than you might think. Just to get you started in thinking about this here are some things to consider. 1. Is the piece a work of art, like a sculpture? There is a famous landmark here in Napa County of a grape crusher. It is copyright of the artist and its use is regulated by that. 2. Is it a commercial building? Then its use may be licensed by the owner as part of their identity.
I just finished this cabin from Cat’s Cradle and I just love it. In fact it’s probably going up on the wall by my desk. It features lots of fun techniques, including needlepoint damask for the night sky. This one mixes textured stitches with Basketweave in two different navy blue threads to make a complex, but not overwhelming pattern. Needlepoint damask is perfect when plain basketweave is too boring but a patterned stitch would be too much. The star features a couched tail and three steps to make the star (none of them hard). The cabin uses textured stitches. The snow on the mountains is a sparkly metallic. My favorite thing about the design is the different ways it uses overdyed threads. I know from experience, how perplexing these threads can be in painted canvas, but several methods are used here. The moutains and the cabin use textured stitches and
It’s just a little section of a bigger needlepoint piece, but I wanted to share with you this lively purse from Whimsy & grace. I’m doing a stitch guide for this hand-painted canvas and it is so elegant. I’m mostly using silks and metallic threads with a bit of pearl cotton. I love needlepoint evening bags and this one’s a real winner. Each patch has a different stitch pattern and each pattern is repeated, except for the center patch. I love some of the effects I’m getting and I wanted to point them out to you. On the left edge of the patch is a pattern I call pavement. It’s made up of Scotch Stitches, in Splendor. It’s surrounded by Cashmere Stitches, in Silk Serica. The corners are Smyrna Crosses in blue Kreinik metallic. The three stitches and textures combine to make a pattern which is lively, even though monochromatic.
Ruth Dilts with Joan Lohr, Rainbow Gallery, 2007. In Needlepoint 101, Ruth took us through the process of stitching a canvas with tips, stitch, and several stitch guides. But we wanted more. Ruth has delivered everything we wanted and even more in this second volume. Here the emphasis is on embellishment of the painted canvas ,so lots of clever techniques and new stitches are covered. So much great stuff is packed into this book, it’s hard to know where to start. The book opens with Ruth’s “philosophy of embellishment,” a one page outline of her approach to selecting stitches and embellishments for a canvas. Next she defines terms and has a list of abbreviations. Then she has an index. It’s worth taking some time to study this because it is a complete outline of the rest of the book. Ruth covers many difficult techniques in detail, some of which still