When I taught myself to needlepoint most people held their stitching in their hand without a frame or stretcher bars. Everyone wet and then blocked their finished needlepoint projects by pinning them to blocking boards. Some folks painted the back side of their canvas with rabbit glue to hold the shape after blocking. I knew some people used stretcher bars when they stitched, but I didn’t understand why--until I stitched my leopard spots pillow. It was fairly good sized, probably 13-14 inches square, stitched with Paternayan yarn in tent stitches (I used the continental version of tent stitch, which is notorious for pulling a canvas out of true) on penelope canvas. When I finished stitching it, it looked really nice except that the square was now a parallelogram. I blocked it three separate times, and as soon as the canvas was dry and off the blocking board, it reverted to the parallelogram shape, at least a little. I finally gave up on making the leopard canvas square and started putting my canvases on stretcher bars.
Stretcher bars do take some getting used to because holding a frame while you stitch is awkward, but many folks now also use a floor or table frame that takes over the job of holding the stretcher bars in position while you stitch with both hands. Some brands are heavier than others, so if you find stretcher bars too weighty, see if you can find the lighter weight, slimmer ones.
If you look at the photo of Autumn Leaves above you’ll see it’s stapled to fairly wide stretcher bars. I like the slim ones but my pair was in use already so I picked up the only brand available to me locally, the wide and heavy ones. I will probably stitch most of this piece in hand instead of putting this in my K’s metal floor frame. I save that for larger pieces. The piece itself is only 3 by 6 inches but the margins are very wide so it is on 8x10 stretcher bars.
You’ll also see that I turned the edge of the canvas over. I couldn’t get the next larger size of stretcher bars so I made do with what I could buy. Those of you in areas with many needlepoint shops will be able to buy just the sizes you need but many of us don’t have that luxury. It doesn’t make any difference to the stitching that I can see. I could have cut off the extra canvas to match to the size of my stretcher bars but since this is a teaching piece I thought I’d demonstrate various ways of handling the problem of a canvas slightly larger than the stretcher bars.
Many stitchers I know use thumbtacks to attach their canvas to the frame but since I can’t buy the big ones here, I use my staple gun. For me it works just as well, although one day I might treat myself to several boxes of the nice large thumbtacks and the tool to put them in and remove them. You can see the Corjac Thumbtack Kit here. Something very similar is called the EZ Tack It kit. I have seen the Corjac at Needlewoman East and it is very well made, so when I buy, that will be what I choose.
http://www.joann.com/joann/catalog.jsp?CATID=cat2887&PRODID=prd17161&AID=10273743&PID=2493916&_requestid=463078
or Tiny URL
http://tinyurl.com/6koqj9
Next time we’ll talk about the threads I choose for Autumn Leaves and after that where I plan to start stitching and why.
Main blog at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow
