Friday, May 16, 2008

The First Autumn Leaf


Now we can finally get started on the Autumn Leaf piece by Lani. I plan to start in the center with the small brown and ivory leaf. There are three colors in the leaf: dark brown outlines and veins, a golden brown shaded area in the center, and a pale ivory leaf around the edge. You’ll also note that the upper left hand corner and the bottom right hand corner are very dark brown leaf tips. The threads I have for these colors are:

dark brown - Mandarin Floss #M886 (Rainbow Gallery)
golden brown - Mandarin Flos #M842 (Rainbow Gallery)
ivory - Impressions #1146 (Caron) AND
ivory - Silk Lame Braid SL03 (Rainbow Gallery)

Mandarin Floss is a 6 ply thread that looks like cotton floss except it is made of bamboo fiber. Once you separate the strands into 6 separate plies, each ply seems a little fuzzy. compared to cotton floss plies. I think the colors are very like those in nature, particularly the greens and browns. Here is Rainbow Gallery’s color card. It is now available in some overdyed colors, apparently, but for this project I choose all solids.

http://www.rainbowgallery.com/detail.cfm?ID=993

Impressions is a 50% silk/50% wool blend. The thread is a thin strand, sort of like crewel wool but with a sheen from the silk in it. Caron makes both solids and overdyes in Impressions. Here is information and the color card from their website.

http://www.caron-net.com/threads.html

http://www.caron-net.com/impsolid.html

Silk Lame Braid is a new thread in the last 6 months or so. It is one strand made up of 4 plies of silk strand wrapped by 4 plies of metallic gold. It is meant to be stitched as one whole strand instead of being plied on 18 count NP canvas. Here’s the Rainbow Gallery website again, with a link to the color card.

http://www.rainbowgallery.com/detail.cfm?ID=1149

You’ll note I have two threads in ivory--the Silk Lame Braid and the Impressions. Both are the right color but I thought I might use the slight metallic sparkle in some of the leaves or perhaps in the border. I haven’t decided yet if the first small center leaf will be done in the ivory silk/wool blend or in the ivory silk/metallic blend.

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