As you can see from the picture, I've been fairly busy with the Joan Thomasson Holiday Spirit wizard. He has a flagstone floor (Swirl stitch from Jo I. Christensen's Needlepoint Book, 1999 edition) in three plies of dark gray Splendor and I've started a stone wall behind him on the left side near his staff (Linked Stitch from Even More Stitches for Effect) in one ply of light gray Splendor.
This piece is going to be a standup most likely, and I feel they look odd without some sort of setting. Wizards live in stone castles, right? So the decision to give him a flagstone floor and stone walls was easy. I choose a smaller scale stitch for the wall than the floor since there isn't that much space around the sides of the wizard Santa figure. Can you see the mark where the background ends that I made from tracing around the paper pattern? I know I cut it off at the top but I crop photos as much as possible to make them faster to load on all the computers of blog visitors.
I've made a counting error in the floor stitch (it's right under his heel) but I'm not going to pull it out. I just compensated the stitches under that area. Sometimes one can be too perfect and I think a real stone floor will have areas that aren't quite identical. That's a good rationalization, anyway!
The other thing I've done is to stitch his face and hands. His eyebrows are not done--that needs to wait until after I decide on stitches and threads for his hair and beard. If you squint at his hands, you'll see dark lines marking the fingers. I used the same Splendor silk there as in his cheeks but it doesn't seem dark enough. I'm going to have to pull those stitches out and redo them.
The last thing that is finished here are his eyes. Joan Thomasson often paints a straight line for eyes on her figures but I didn't like how they looked with a row of five tent stitches, so instead I stitched two straight horizontal lines using a grey-blue Kreinik #4 metallic in parallel. The top line I pulled up with a little couching stitch; the bottom line was left straight. That gave me a sort of very long and short triangle. I put a tiny French knot in the middle of the triangle for the eye pupil. I like the effect so far, but don't be surprised if I come up with something I like better later on.
The wizard is starting to have a bit of personality now. My next step will be to finish the floor and more of the wall while I debate what to do with his silver and gold striped sleeves. Wish me luck.
Main blog at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow
