Originally posted 2009-03-30 06:08:22. Republished by Blog Post PromoterI got this question over the weekend and I know it’s a problem many of you face: “How do I repair a hole in my unstitched needlepoint canvas?” There are two ways to fix the problem, depending on how large the hole is. If the hole is only one thread which has been cut, you ought to be able just to stitch over it. But this ONLY works if it’s one thread. Although I have done Tent Stitch in this case, it really works best if the stitch is longer AND is not beginning of ending on either side of the hole. If that’s the case, just stitch as you normally would. If it’s more than one hole find a piece of canvas the same mesh size, slightly bigger than the hole, about three to four threads all around. You could even
Monthly Archive:: February 2013
On Wednesday, I’m rearranging my office, with help of course. We’re switching the daybed & the desk. This is good because I’ll look at the street instead of the garage & I won’t have to go around the desk to sit down. This is bad because a.) the furniture can only fit ONE WAY & will not fit otherwise. b.) I have LOTS & LOTS of stuff to pack, move across the hall to the living room, move back, then unpack & put away. Therefore I’m minimizing what I do this week in order to get through this all. Reposts of old material will be put up daily but new posts will resume March 4, 2013 when I have a neat new office
Originally posted 2008-08-05 08:08:39. Republished by Blog Post Promoter I’m a big fan of being thrifty in needlepoint. I have so much thread that shopping my stash first is always an excellent idea. But using your thread stash should include more things than just needlepoint. I found this podcast from CraftyPod on how to use scrap thread to make pendants from washers. It’s a great idea and doesn’t use much thread. I’m thinking about going to the hardware store and getting an assortment of washer, wrapping them and putting them together on some fabric to make a cool Christmas ornament
Originally posted 2007-12-20 08:31:14. Republished by Blog Post Promoter I just wanted to take a minute to show you how lovely the address book looks finished with the Scrap Bag Needlepoint Bargello on it. I’m so happy with the results. The Scrap Bag idea looks so fun in this small space. One cool thing about this vintage address book is that it has a padded board to make the needlepoint puffy. It’s about 1/4″ smaller than the opening all around and you insert it under the needlepoint once two sides have been tucked into the cover. Although I rarely see items with this these days, it’s a simple idea you can do yourself. You could cut a pieces of acid-free foamcore, use quilt batting with a fabric cover over cardboard, or even just some mat board or cardboard. One good thing about doing this is that it makes the whole
Originally posted 2010-05-30 07:04:02. Republished by Blog Post Promoter This bold needlepoint Bargello cell phone case is designed to hook on your belt. It’s the free pattern in the quarterly newsletter from Ziva Needlepoint. Ziva’s designs have a clean contemporary style and are geometrics based on historic design periods. They design needlepoint accessories for the home and for you and I’m bowled over by how wonderful the designs are. In addition to the lovely designs on the site, you will also find information about finishing many of the items. The designs come as hand-painted canvas with a guide to the amounts and colors of wool needed, a needle, and instructions for finishing the project. There is also a free bracelet design, Anatolie, done in Basketweave available from the first newsletter. A big shout out to Denise from Craft Gossip and Althea from Bargello Needlepoint for pointing this out to me
Originally posted 2009-05-28 11:53:29. Republished by Blog Post PromoterPlanet Earth Fibers is a maker of silk knitting yarns who is now packaging two of their yarns for needlepoint. Both of these threads are lovely for stitching and I enjoyed using them both. The silk is a fat single strand silk thread, similar to Vineyard Silk or Silk & Ivory in thickness, which works on 13 to 18 mesh. It is a fairly lofty thread and is available in 152 colors. There are many softly shaded colors in the range with some color families having four shades in them. The six strand silk can be plied and recombined to work on all mesh sizes. It comes in 125 colors, with six semi-solid overdyes. The remainder is dyed to match the colors of the silk. This too was a lovely thread, a smooth silk that was easy to stitch with. One thing
Originally posted 2009-04-09 07:03:54. Republished by Blog Post Promoter I just finished the Daffodil Bargello boxtop and I’m so pleased. One of the things I love about Bargello is that it gives me time to think. On this piece I thought about how the “random” look of the scrap Bag project is actually planned using some guidelines, so that it looks random, but still is a good composition. So I thought I’d share them with you today. The guidelines themselves are in bold, so you can easily skim the article for them. 1. If your piece is reflecting something in real life, follow the real life thing for color ideas. I made daffodils. I chose yellow, some orange, and some white. Yellow by far predominates. And orange and white are only used in certain places. Orange is always a trumpet on a daffodil, never the petals. So orange only is
Originally posted 2010-04-21 07:35:01. Republished by Blog Post Promoter For the last year or so there has been plenty of talk about economic hard times. The term “recessionista” pops up in fashion magazines. Most days an economic headline is on the front page of our newspapers. People in all walks of life are seriously struggling. And, of course, crafts and hobbies struggle more than many industries because they are bought using discretionary income. If more and more of your money is going into the necessities (food, clothing, housing, and basic transportation), it should come as no surprise to anyone that hobbies suffer. But being on a tight budget is not a new thing. But we’ve forgotten something that my parents and grandparents knew — you don’t HAVE to spend lots of money to live well. They talked about champagne on a beer budget, and we talk about living richly. What
Originally posted 2009-06-06 17:47:08. Republished by Blog Post PromoterIf you spend much time in the needlepoint world, just as in any other world, you will find stitcher’s have some special terms for things. This is a list, by no means complete, of some of those words. Stash – Your accumulation of stitchy stuff of all kinds from threads to projects you hope to stitch someday. Whether you want to or not, you will accumulate a stash even if it is only bits of thread leftover from projects. Some stashes are so large that people stitch whole projects from them. I’m a great one for this. SABLE – An acronym meaning Stash Accumulation Beyond Life Expectancy. I don’t remember who coined this (if you do, please speak up in the comments), but it’s what happens when your stash is large and continues to grow. I am clearly at this point with
Originally posted 2009-12-22 06:46:21. Republished by Blog Post PromoterOver the weekend I got asked about starting and ending threads on a piece where there are lots of different colors and coverage. This got me thinking about “show through” and how it applies to needlepoint. You almost certainly have been told to stitch light colors first. And I thought, for a long time, that this mainly applied to wools. That’s only partially true. It applies to wooly and furry threads because the tendrils of the thread got twisted up in each other. Light in dark will have little effect, dark in light will mess up the color. But it does apply to other threads as well for a different reason. Depending on the stitch, threads traveling behind the color may show more or less. The darker the color the less this will show. That’s one reason why teachers encourage you to
Originally posted 2010-05-06 07:57:45. Republished by Blog Post Promoter When I talk to needlepointers, I find that so often they want guidance in stitching their canvas. A hand-painted canvas needlepoint is a significant investment and, all too often, we hesititate to stitch a canvas we really love because we don’t know where to begin. That’s why we want stitch guides. But all too often they disappoint. They use threads that no longer exist. They put the stitches (and maybe not all of them) at the end of the guide or don’t include them at all. They don’t help me stitch the canvas, they just list an area, thread, and stitch. And they are expensive. I think there has to be a better way. A stitch guide that realizes you have made an investment in threads and have a stash. A stitch guide that will tell you things you can apply
Do you live in San Francisco’s East or North Bay, Solano County, or Sacramento? Have you been wanting to learn needlepoint but couldn’t find a warm, inviting place to learn without all the stuffiness of the “needlepoint police?” Sandy Grossman-Morris and I have teamed up to create this exclusive needlepoint class for beginners, starting March 2, 2013. The design is the adorable ice cream cone seen here, created exclusively for the class. The class kit is included in the fee and has everything you need to stitch the canvas: computer-printed canvas all threads stretcher bars tacks needle Even if you have never tried needlepoint before you’ll learn everything you need to know, including 2 kinds of Tent Stitches and five decorative stitches. You’ll have a chance to use four kinds of threads and you’ll get samples of many more. The class is three lessons, one month apart. They will be
“It’s just Painting by Numbers.” That’s an insult often hurled at needlepointers. And it’s mostly untrue — or is it? Yes we apply our creativity by picking threads and, sometimes, stitches. But how often do we go beyond this to stretch ourselves and create something special? I’m all for this process, it’s the basis of what we do, but there’s a lack here, something that keeps us from using this wonderful media to exercise our creativity fully and to stretch our knowledge and imagination. Thinking about it how often do we know what we’ll get when we start to stitch? How often do we get predictable results in needlepoint? Not often enough. By “predictable” I don’t mean cookie cutter results. I mean that you understand the tolls of needlepoint and the principles of art well enough that you’ll pick the ones you need to get the results you see in