Monday, October 25, 2010

Mixing and Matching Threads

Now that I have Luna's skin and face stitched (except for her hands), it is time to turn my attention to her figure.  The photo is the unstitched canvas cropped to show just Luna's figure.

My next task is to figure out what threads to use to stitch her and what order to do the stitching in.  As you know, I like to stitch the things that are in the background, then work forward.  That means I should start with her long gown, probably working from the bodice down to where it narrows and starts showing gray lines of the flare.  But what threads should I use?

I piled up all the colors I have that I'll need for her clothing and hair (black, gray and purple) and removed those that didn't look right together.  For example, a lovely skein of black Silk N Ivory revealed it had charcoal undertones when it was sitting next to all the solid blacks, so it goes back into the stash.  A spool of black Kreinik metallic had too much green sparkle in it so it was rejected, too.


This not particularly good photo shows that one of the grays at the bottom of the page looks slightly tan when put together with the other threads.  This is an essential step when choosing threads.  Color Magic happens when various threads are next to each other.  Some change colors like that gray skein did!

Once I discarded colors that wouldn't play nice with the others, I was left with a fairly good selection of blacks, some purples and quite a few grays.  The next step is choosing my stitches which will narrow down the thread selection further.  Some threads don't do long stitches well, some are going to be too fat for 18 count, etc.

Tomorrow I'll show you what I ended up with.

Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow Blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com Archived Yahoo 360 postings at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chillyhollow