I've finished the fish scales on Gail's goldfish as you can see in the photo above. It dawned on me that I didn't explain how I worked the stitch or how I choose the color of the single ply of Splendor silk I used for it.
First, I worked Judy's Blocks from the top of each column down. I worked the cashmere stitch and then the four tent stitches in a block and then the cashmere stitch again These stitches are offset slightly so the next row you have to adjust the position of your starting point. You could alwo work the cashmere stitches on the diagonal and then go back and fill in with tent stitches but I found that harder to do so I just did a column at a time. To keep the silk as straight as possible, I let my needle dangle to untwist the thread after each cashmere stitch was finiished.
I worked from the head back, omitting the bulging fish eyes and mouth. Those will be worked in a different stitch later. I started with orange, then switched to rose, then to coral, then dark orange, then light orange, then a touch of pale yellow and finally pale pink. I choose these colors by looking at the unstitched canvas, and decided which color was most prominent in the fish's body. I laid that color out above the fish then moved to the next area and choose the most prominent color there, etc. Once I was happy with how the skeins of thread seemed to flow, those are the colors I went with. Most areas have 3-5 colors in them but I choose the color that seemed most prominent except at the head where I ignored the dark brown and choose the rose instead.
I finished either the tent stitch block or the cashmere block before I changed color, even if the paint seemed to switch abruptly. I thought it more important to get the stitch right than the color, and I think it worked out well.
Next, the fins and tail.
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