art Archive

For all these years I’ve been doing needlepoint, I’ve always seen things that inspire me: great ideas, lovely needlepoint, cool techniques. And until recently I’ve kept these by making notebooks, lots and lots of notebooks. But there are several problems with them. They are not organized take up too much space new ones can be hard to find Pinterest acts as a wonderful virtual and organized notebook. I’m crazy about the site and I’m using it as a collected repository of needlepoint. On Pinterest, images are collected into boards that are of a subject. Because you determine the names of the boards, you can categorize them however you like. For example, I have a board called “cats” but another pinner (the term for users) has boards for tabby cats, white cats, black cats, and kittens. Most of my boards have to do with needlepoint and I’d like to share them

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Originally posted 2002-10-12 22:39:33. Republished by Blog Post PromoterAs a needlepointer, I find that often my work gets trivialized by artists and by people who do other fiber arts. Needlepoint suffers from a “little old lady” syndrome, which is completely out of sync with the reality of the art we produce, which is often far more advanced than what is done by other, more accepted arts. As needlepointers we should carry the banner for acceptance of our work as a fiber art. We can do this in lots of ways small and large: enter your pieces in the local fairs as art not as craft or “home arts” You may not win prizes, but you will start to lay the foundation. carry your needlepoint with you, show off the work in your home host an exhibit of your work at the local library, school or shopping mall (often they will

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Originally posted 2010-02-08 07:41:20. Republished by Blog Post PromoterWendy Costa’s art has now been adapted to needlepoint and is available from Maggie Co. There are nine whimsical dresses and two delightful veggie designs that would be great in a kitchen. They are on 18 mesh

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Some landscapes, regardless of when they were painted or by what artist, are harder to interpret in needlepoint than others. Compare a traditional landscape, even one by someone as recent as Van Gogh or Cezanne with the Donna Horn landscape above. These more flat landscapes are a perfect starting point for stitching and for exploring texture in landscape needlepoint. Does the landscape you are about to stitch have distant hills or a lot of detail in the foreground? How do you distinguish the areas in the immediate foreground than the areas just behind it? Is the sky large, cloudy or raining? Is there a lot of bark or dense foliage? There are many different types of stitches that can be used to great effect depending on whether you are trying realistically to stitch a bark, cloudy sky, or any of the above. Our Beginner Landscapes Stitch Technique book will be

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Hal Mayforth is a witty illustrator and painter. Now his delightful, whimsical art can be found in needlepoint canvases distributed by Ruth Schmuff. She announced it earlier this week with a blog post showing off the first designs in the line. The canvas pictured here is one of them. A stitch guide by Julia Snyder is in progress for one of them and Brenda Hart will be stitch guiding another in a class. Ruth would love your help in letting her know which of Mayforth’s other works you’d like to see. Go visit his site and let her know

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I’m so excited about Art Needlepoint’s Fall Retreat (details & registration through the link). It’s in mid-October, in a glorious location, and will feature artist Tina Close. Her works are illustrating this post. The retreat will be held in a studio and so numbers are limited. In addition to being a talented painter (I love her work), she is also an accomplished needlewoman and a member of a very talented family, including her sister, Glenn, an actress, her brother, Sandy, an inventor, and her youngest sister, Jessie, a writer and speaker for Bring Change 2 Mind. The theme of the retreat is creativity and needlepoint. It’s October 12 & 13 at the Fife n’Drum in Kent, CT. That’s a Friday and Saturday, with Saturday being the retreat day. The retreat includes one of Close’s canvases with threads, two sessions, lunch, dinner, and a very full retreat bag. The cost is

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Originally posted 2010-05-09 07:39:25. Republished by Blog Post PromoterThere has been some discussion around the web this week about fine art reproductions on canvas and it’s getting me a concerned. It seems to me that people want every decision to be made for them before they stitch (no room for interpretation) and that many seem to want a needlepoint version of a painting to be, I’m sorry to classify it this way, a stitched “paint by number” version of the original art. As a result I’d like to clear something up. I’ve spent a long time studying both the different ways needlepoint designs can be produced, the different ways to stitch them, and the difference between needlepoint and other mediums. There are two ways to get a design reproduced on needlepoint canvas, by hand and by a mechanical process. By hand the design is either drawn (line-drawn) or painted on

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Originally posted 2007-03-29 22:21:29. Republished by Blog Post PromoterA little while ago I got an email update from the marketing and forecasting company, Unity Marketing about what people put on their walls. I stuck many chords with me, as I’m sure it will with you. “If you want to know about the tastes and interests of the American consumer, you need only look at his or her walls” is the beginning of the article. Your choice of art, including needlepoint, reflects your tastes, you home’s decor, and you passion for needlepoint. Most of the art in my bedroom is needlepoint, and all of it is by one artist. Most of the pieces are small but the one over the bed is quite large. When we bought the canvas (15 years ago) it was over $300 and the threads doubled that. But, as my husband said at the time “It’s art

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Originally posted 2003-09-18 06:56:49. Republished by Blog Post PromoterCeltic Art in Cross Stitch Barbara Hammet I just love Barbara’s two other books of cross stitch designs (Art Nouveau and William Morris), so I was delighted to see this new books. The book opens with a very good introduction about Celtic Art which looks at it from the point of view of design style and elements. This is followed by ten chapters of projects related to each other by theme and color. For example, the chapter on La Tene (one of the earliest forms of Celtic art) consists of table linens including a beautiful tablecloth, napkins and coasters. In the instructions there is also information on varying these designs to make table toppers and runners. For each project there is a full color picture of the completed stitching, a material list, a full-color chart and stitching instructions. A nice touch is

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Originally posted 2010-07-09 07:39:41. Republished by Blog Post PromoterTalk about stitchy goodness for inspiration and adaptation, thanks to my DD, who is REALLY good at finding these things, I found a blog called Agence eureka, which is chock fill of great vintage printed material. It’s written in French, but the important thing is the wonderful images. I found things, like this chart from an arithmetic book, that could go straight to needlepoint. There were more pictures from textbooks, illustrated magazines, children’s books and games, and advertisements. There are even tons of vintage alphabets to adapt. Just think how fun it would be to do a version of this snowman in needlepoint. I think I’m in stitching heaven!

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I don’t like it when people criticize needlepoint saying it’s like “painting by numbers.” Being the daughter and granddaughter of very creative women, I have always seen, as have they, needlepoint as a very artistic and creative process. A blog post last week at The Textile Blog got me thinking about this again. All art is a conversation. In it there are always two people: the artist and the person seeing the art. The artist has an idea and expresses it in a particular way. It may not be an idea you like and it may be expressed in a way you find ugly. But he began the conversation with his idea and its expression. The second person in the conversation is the person viewing the art. By seeing the expression of the idea, you, even if it’s just mentally, react to it and comment back. I never thought much

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Originally posted 2008-11-12 04:58:46. Republished by Blog Post Promoter Last month my friend Lorene Salt & her husband were visiting Napa Valley. We met for lunch and Lorene brought me pictures of her wonderful stitching. I was blown away thinking about the piece pictured above. In fact I kept thinking about it. It was one of Lorene’s pieces for her Master Craftsman from the Embroiderers Association of Canada. It’s an adaptation anyone can do and so I asked her to share it with you. This is what she says about the piece: For this project I was told to cut a piece of black construction paper into various shapes. I was then supposed to glue it onto white paper as if it were an exploding diagram. Once I had a design that I was happy with, I glued the black pieces on to the white paper. I then traced the

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