Dressing Jade

The lady's maid I call Jade on the right side of the Three Women and a Peach canvas has a robe now and I've started her hair. As you can see, I removed the medium gray outlines of her robe and restitched them in black using the same black Soy Fiber I am going to use for her hair. This same thread also created Pearl's hair, the cleaning lady on the left of this set of three women.

Robe
I discovered it was a lot easier to rip out everything (her robe, her arm, the outline stitches) and redo it when the grey outlines on her robe were just too pale. Combining medium gray outlines with medium and light blue stitches for the robe didn't give me enough contrast. I know this, having stitched a background in mint green with lilac flowers once. Although you'd think mint green and lilac aren't much alike, pale shades of both disappear into each other, which made my background muddy and without the flowers scattered around I intended. I should have learned from that but it is easy to forget lessons learned in needlepoint, as in Life! So don't you forget--mixing two light shades or even a light and medium shade may not give you enough color contrast to define the various parts of the design you are stitching.

Hair
For her hair, I mentally divided the hair into sections: the "pony tail" held by the ribbons, the tendrils of hair along her cheek and forehead, the little upturned curls at the base of her neck, the bangs at the top of her forehead and the main body of her hair. If you look at the photo, you'll see how small an area there is for her bangs, the tendrils, the nape of her neck and some of the pony tail area between the pink and blue bows in her hair. I tent stitched all of these areas except the tendrils with my Soy Silk. Tent stitches will cover all these areas and serve as padding for the top stitching I plan to do. The main body of her hair and some of her pony tail will have long lengths of my Soy Fiber laid across them in straight lines reaching from a stitch or two inside the black hair paint border to the other side almost to the edge of the paint. This raises the next layer of stitches to give a padded effect, but padding doesn't work in very small areas, hence the tent stitches. The little curls along her check had to be done differently. They are jagged vertical lines which are perfect for padded stem stitch. There are four lines, two short and two long. The short ones each got only two staggered stem stitches but the long lines had a series of rows of padded stem stitch. Sometimes I did three stem stitches, sometimes two, depending on how wide the area was.

Once the tendrils and tent stitches were done, time to pad. My first step was to grab my black and white xerox copy of the canvas and sketch in pencil how her hair flows. Once I had an idea whether an area would have slanted lines, horizontal lines, etc. of hair, I could decide how to lay the underlying padding threads. If your top layer will be straight vertical stitches, the padding is horizontal. If your lines will slant/ to the right, your padding probably will need to slant left \. This keeps the top layer raised. I will sketch this out in detail when I do the geisha's hair because she has such an elaborate wig, so this may become clearer later on. Hopefully you can see the mostly horizontal stitches of padding on Jade's hair. I'll post a second photo with her hair finished once I get the bows in her hair stitched.

Jane/Chilly Hollow
Main blog at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow