The photo shows you the right half of the Autumn Leaves canvas. The brown leaf I started with in the center of the canvas is partly visible on the left side. In this photo I tried jumping around to stitch various areas. First I stitched the two purple background areas that are on the right side of the piece all in basketweave. You won’t see any knots on top of the canvas as I used a no knot technique to start the purple Impressions (#2056).Then I stitched the bit of red leaf at the top right of the canvas, followed by the brown leaf in the right side lower corner.
The red leaf was stitched from the dark brown outline in towards the center. The dark brown/grey thread is 5 plies of my Mandarin Floss M821. I stitched the outline in half cross stitch first. Then I switched to two shades of Panache, stitching the bright orange #PN31 in basketweave, then switched to the darker red-orange PN30 when the color got redder. It was also stitched in basketweave.
The brown leaf was stitched from the inside out to the outline last, the reverse of the red leaf. I started in the middle of the leaf with the golden brown Mandarin Floss M842, again with 5 plies in basketweave. Then I stitched the dark brown bit at the bottom of the leaf with 5 plies of Mandarin Floss M886. After that I finished the inside of the leaf with two strands of my ivory Impressions 1146. The last thing I did was the very dark brown-grey outline, back in Mandarin Floss M821. This was stitched in half-cross stitch.
So you see I stitched the dark outline of the leaves in half-cross and the rest of the two leaves and the background was all in basketweave. But I jumped around a little, trying hard to make each area I stitched the same size/shape/tension of the other areas. I couldn’t tell any difference between stitching the outline first and then the center or working the areas with the center first, then the outline.
You can’t rush basketweave. There’s a reason that it is often used as meditation by experienced stitchers--making each stitch the same as all the others relaxes you as you concentrate on the tension, the angle of your needle (straight up so you put it down through the hole at a 90 degree angle to the canvas), and even whether you are stitching the basketweave diagonal upwards or down.
Ever stitched a large area of basketweave and had a diagonal ridge on it? This happens from one of two things--you either ran your thread through the back at a diagonal which made the front diagonal line of threads a bit more raised than its neighbors, or you accidentally did two down (or up) rows together instead of alternating working up the diagonal with the next row down the diagonal. To fix ridges caused by ending off your thread, simply run your thread through the back straight up vertically or across horizontally, or use an ending technique that doesn’t need the thread to be run through the back side’s stitches. More on that later.
To keep from doing two down rows one right after the other, you need to take a careful look at your mono needlepoint canvas. (This technique does not work for penelope canvas or interlock canvas, which are woven differently than mono canvas.) Head over to Needlepoint Now’s superb tutorial on needlepointing and look at the photo of all three types of NP canvas. Then look for the diagram of mono canvas in the middle of this page under the photo.
http://www.needlepointnow.com/OnLineClassroom/ACSK-1/Materials.htm
Look very carefully at the threads. Look down a vertical row of threads and you see they are woven under/over the horizontal threads. Look across a horizontal row and you’ll see the same over/under weave. This is the way you keep up and down basketweave rows straight. The thread intersection where a thread is on top we’ll call a pole. The thread intersection where a __ thread is on top we’ll call a step. Just remember that firemen slide DOWN poles and walk UP stairs and you’ll never ever forget whether you are going up your basketweave diagonal or down it, no matter how many times you are interrupted while stitching by the phone/kids/pets/spouses/doorbell.
It works like this (see the bottom of the page--”Stitching With the Weave of the Canvas”).
http://www.needlepointnow.com/OnLineClassroom/ACSK-6/TentStitch.htm
All you are doing is matching the diagonal rows of basketweave to the poles or steps of your canvas. Take that first stitch, then before you do row #2, look at the diagonal row where you will start row #2. Is the pole on top of both places at the top/bottom of the row where you might be able to start? Then that’s a down row. You will start at the top of the diagonal row and stitch down. Are all the stitches in row #2 steps? Then you start at the bottom of the diagonal row and stitch up. Be the fireman and walk UP or slide DOWN. (Many thanks to all the folks who have mentioned this to me over the years! It finally sunk in....)
Basketweave is done on the diagonal, with each row fitting like a zipper into the previous row. Repeat to yourself, the firemen slide down the pole and walk up the stairs as you stitch. A little observation and you will always know where you are with basketweave.
Back to my order of stitching. I don’t see any difference between stitching my half-cross leave outline before or after I did the rest of the leaf in basketweave. The one thing you are going to have to remember (besides the fireman and how he travels) is which side is up. To stitch my little red leaf in the upper right corner of this side of the canvas, I tuned my canvas upside down. This piece has Lani’s signature below the brown leaf in the bottom right corner in this photo, so I always know which is the “top” and which the bottom” of my design. When I get ready to finish this piece, the top and bottom don’t really matter but when I have tent stitches on the front, I have to be careful whether my tent stitches are from basketweave, continental or half-cross, to make sure I don’t mix up the /// stitches with something that is backwards or sideways.
Next time we’ll talk about the brown and peach veins in the big red leaf you see here. I will also talk about the nylon thread Panache which I am using in the red/orange leaves. And I’ll finally get around to talking about the various ways of starting threads on this piece.
Main blog at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow
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