Squiggee's Goldfish Ornament

Now that the Halloween trick-or-treaters stocking is done, I have picked up the other Squiggee design in my stash, the lovely pink fish you see above. I think this must be a goldfish, one of the ones that charmed me in the fishtanks at the pet store when I was a child. They are all bulging eyes and beautiful colors, with a long graceful tail and a fat wiggle to their upper bodies. Squiggee's is pink, my favorite color, and was taken from a Gail Hendrix design of a frog weight that had lots of underwater motifs on it. I asked Gail if she would turn the goldfish into an ornament for me and she did.

Most Squiggee painted canvases are lighthearted but this taps into Gail's more classic design sense. It is on 18 count canvas and is approximately 4 inches in diameter. When I asked her to paint this for me, I explicitly said it should not be an exclusive for me, but a design that anyone can buy from her Squiggee website, so you can have your own goldfish for your home if you so desire. Here's Squiggee's website so you can have a fun browse.

http://www.squiggeedesigns.com/

It is beautifully stitched-painted and must have taken hours to do. If you look closely at the fish scales, you'll see careful lines of color that range from a very dark brown through roses and corals and oranges to yellow and shades of pale pink that become almost white. The goldfish swims among lily pads in medium blue waters. When I started pulling colors, I discovered that I can use all the silks form the two little Asian girls in this design. The colors are almost identical. I did have to find earthy greens (mostly Mandarin silks) and a pretty blue in Rainbow Gallery's Grandeur (silk perle size #5).

My thought in starting to stitch Gail's goldfish was to use stitches that don't fully cover so that the piece can be framed over a mirror to give an underwater wet gleam to the fish. After all, most of my silks I pulled are pliable so I can use just one of them easily.

This design has a two-part background (the lilypads and the blue water) and a four-part foreground (the goldfish, with prominent eyes and mouth, long flowing tail, upright dorsal fins and sideways front fins, and finally the body). I decided to start with the goldfish's body and find a stitch for the scales first. Look carefully at the body of the fish. Isn't everything sort of upright and rectangular? There are many color changes (another reason to use light coverage stitches--you don't have to change threads often since the color will show under your skimpy thread) so I decided it would not be easy to do scale-shaped stitches here. I thought and browsed my stitch books and thought some more. Nothing seemed to be the right shape or suitable for a light coverage.

Then I visited Judy Harper's blog....

http://fairy-crafts.blogspot.com/2008/07/cq-with-silk-ribbon-and-beads.html

Inspiration strikes at the oddest times! Look at her latest crazy quilt heart, the yellow, coral and green one with the white daisies. Now look at the yellow rectangular stitch at the bottom point. Doesn't that sort of look like the scales on Gail's goldfish to you? I don't know what this stitch is called (can't find it in any of my stitch books) so let's call it Judy's Blocks.

Here is what I've stitched so far on the goldfish's scales, using one ply of silk Splendor in rose, coral and now orange as I work my way toward the fish's tail doing Judy's Blocks. I hope to finish the entire body by the end of the holiday weekend. Pretty soon I'll switch to one ply of yellow and then a pale pink....

This is so much fun!

Main blog at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow

Introducing the Stitching Whimsies

I have a group of guest bloggers to introduce to you today--the Stitching Whimsies. See the Melissa Shirley canvas above? It's called The Stitching Club and the Whimsies are all stitching this canvas. But here's Gini to explain how they got started and what they are doing.

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"Several stitchers who live in the Antelope Valley portion of Southern California decided to go to Queen Anne Stitches in Santa Clarita, CA, our "local" shop some 35 miles away, to spend the day stitching there. That was several months ago. Over time, the group grew sort of like Topsey, as additional people who stopped in the shop while we were there began coming back to stitch with us. We arrive every Thursday when the shop opens at 11. Then we stitch and chat for a while, break for lunch at one of the several nearby places, then stitch again until around 4. We don't always get a lot of stitching done, but we do have fun.

An aside about Heidi Bontempo (aka the Queen) and her shop… She's been the sole owner for two years, having bought out her partner (aka the Queen Mum). Heidi listens to what her customers want, continues to add new thread lines, carries a variety of canvas sizes, artists, and styles, has trunk shows every other month, and will soon have an online presence. She and Sherry Bray are both fun to be around, and the shop has a wonderfully warm, friendly vibe.

One day, we passed around the Needlepoint Now magazine with the article about Melissa Shirley. [Note: This is the March 2008 issue.] Someone suggested we do "The Stitching Club" together, in what Heidi and Sherry call a "who ha" group, essentially a self-directed class. It means we discuss the canvas, share ideas about stitches and threads for particular areas, and then decide what to do on our own canvas. We spend time passing our canvases around for comments,critiques, and encouragement. The canvas we are stitching is shown above. You can see others in this series here:

http://www.melissashirleydesigns.com//gallery/?cat=74

Heidi dubbed us the Whimsies to distinguish us in her own mind from her other groups, even though some of us have multiple memberships! Six of us are working on The Stitching Club -- Sharon, Gini, Kathy, Jackie, Lori and Nancy. And like our group, it's now known as The Stitching Whimsies. Some of us are far more interested in the process of stitching than in finishing any particular project. Some stitch daily, others less often. Most of us have a myriad of other projects at some stage of completion. And we all like to learn as much as we can from teachers and other stitchers. A core group of 6 or 7 attends regularly and others attend frequently. Heidi happened to show us a new canvas, Associated Talents' Funky Forest. Nancy was talking about ordering it for herself, when Lori piped up and suggested we do it as our next group project. Over a dozen people have ordered that one.

http://www.atneedlepoint.com/CanvasDetails.asp?CanvasNumber=M-164&Example=

signed, Gini

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I hope to have a Whimsy or two drop by about every other Sunday to update you on the progress on their canvases. It's easy to think that there is only one "right" way to stitch a painted canvas. When you see what each Whimsy does with the same canvas and how they all look good, the real charm of painted canvases and how they customize themselves to their stitcher's personality and tastes will be revealed!

Many thanks to the Whimsies for allowing themselves to be showcased here. And by the way, Queen Anne Stitches doesn't have a website or I'd be able to show you the natural habitat of Stitching Whimsies.

Main blog at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow