Ch'ing Dynasty Ornament

I've always liked Asian-themed painted canvases and Leigh Designs is one of my favorites so her Ch'ing dragon ornament was a Must Buy for me. A little research showed me that the Ch'ing are the dynasty of emperors we in the West call the Manchu. The dragon was their symbol. The emperor was the son of a red dragon, after all! You can read a bit more about the Ch'ing dragon robe symbolism here.
http://www.artsmia.org/world-myths/viewallart/dragon_background.html

As I said yesterday, this piece is roughly 4 inches in diameter on 18 count red canvas. The dragon, who has red, yellow and orange scales edged in gold, has black fins and whiskers. He breathes fire on a background of red squares separated by a reddish brown grid. He has white on his eyes and mouth as an accent against all the red and black which dominate this canvas.

As is my practice, my first step was to make a color xerox of the design. Then I put the canvas away where I couldn't see it and sketched what I remembered of the pattern. That's also something I regularly do. A sketch tells me what I remember about a design. What I remember is what is important to me and what I want to emphasize in a design. I sketched the dragon's bending body, the black fins and whiskers around the open mouth and staring eyes, the stream of fire he's breathing and the checkerboard background. (And no, I'm not posting a photo of my sketch--no need to have everyone laughing at my art skills!) This is a pretty simple canvas and I remembered most of it, so I had to go to my fallback position to decide what to stitch and how and in what order. The dragon is against a background of a grid. This might be a decorative pattern in clothing if the dragon is embroidered, or perhaps a screen on a wall if the dragon is roaming the emperor's palace. At any rate, the background is definitely behind the dragon. So that's the place to start stitching! I prefer working from the background towards the front when possible. It just seems logical to me. However, there are times when you want to do the background last. It all depends on the canvas and the stitches and colors and threads you are using. As SharonG says, the only rule is that the thread goes through the eye of the needle!

In the photo above you see I've stitched some of the background squares. I decided to use a simple Scotch Stitch for each of them. Scotch Stitches are a perfect fit for the space and leave the grid lines uncovered.
http://www.needlepoint.org/StitchOfTheMonth/98-06.php

I chose a deep red Hi-Lights (H614 Dark Red) for these stitches. Hi-Lights is a synthetic metallic thread wound around a shiny nylon perle type thread. My H614 is a red metallic wound around the red nylon core. It is a bit like blending filament but more rounded and heavier. Here's Rainbow Gallery's tips for working with Hi-Lights.
http://www.rainbowgallery.com/JaysTips.html#15C

Here are all the colors available in Hi-Lights.
http://www.rainbowgallery.com/detail.cfm?ID=669

In my experience you need to use a short length of Hi-Lights because the canvas holes fray it slightly each time you take a stitch. It is very thin and when I did a few Scotch Stitches, I realized that one strand wasn't covering. So I simply went back and did a second Scotch Stitch right on top of the first, but oriented the other way. Look back at the diagram of the Scotch Stitch and you'll see that the slants can run from the Southwest to the Northeast or they can be oriented from the NW to the SE. I ended up with my Scotch Stitches going SW to NE in the bottom layer and then running NW to SE on the top layer. You do have to be careful with your Scotch Stitches that they are all slanting the same direction. One that is going the wrong way will stand out!

I was happy how the little cluster of Scotch Stitches looked, but I was working from a partial card of Hi-Lights. I started to worry that I wouldn't have enough thread to cover the entire background and that all that glitter was Too Much. Dither, dither, dither.... Then the light bulb went off over my head.

See how the Scotch Stitches I've done above are in a rough C shape? That's deliberate. My solution to the double issue of Too Much Glitter and Not Enough Thread was to use the red Hi-Lights #H614 for just highlights, not the entire background. I'd pulled two skeins of Soie d'Alger silk out of my stash because they were the right reds and decided I would use the lighter shade (2925) for the rest of my background Scotch Stitches. Soie d'Alger is a silk floss and I know how silk shines and catches the light. If I carefully laid my Scotch Stitches done in this thread and alternated the direction of how they were oriented on each diagonal row, I'd add more shine and light direction interest to the piece without overwhelming it with metallics. This is the background, after all. One doesn't want the background fancier than the foreground, just like one doesn't want a bridesmaid in a prettier gown than the bride's!

So I spent a lot of time laying two plies of my deep red Soie d'Alger in Scotch Stitches, working diagonally a row at a time to make sure that each square was oriented correctly in relation to its neighbors. Here you see the canvas with all the Scotch Stitches finished.


The moral of all my problems I listed above is that figuring out what to do when your thread doesn't cover or when you think you'll run out of thread will lead you to interesting and creative ways of dealing with your current canvas. In my experience, problems make me the most creative with my needlepoint and that's when things turn out best. Next time I'll talk about the final two steps for stitching the background.

Jane/Chilly Hollow
Archived Yahoo 360 postings at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chillyhollow