Sunday, July 12, 2009

99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall



"99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer, take one down and pass it around, 98 bottles of beer on the wall...."

If you ever went to day camp with the Girl Scouts in the U.S., you learned this song.  

If you ever spent three weeks stitching the boring border of Cape Cod Dogs, you probably need an alcoholic beverage right now!

As you can see, the border is finished except for each corner's scallop shells and their seaweed.  I will wait until I choose more threads for the central design before I do these areas as I want to repeat threads.    I've not finished the corners for the red padded outside border, either.  I can't decide whether to round the corners off with more red Mandarin floss or use black on the corners only.  I'm putting off deciding these things for a bit longer.  I'll mentally try on threads and will eventually come to a conclusion.

I deliberately cropped the canvas this way to focus your attention on the next area I am going to work on--the shelves full of liquor bottles behind the bar.  Most of this area will be tent stitched.  The bottles are very small, usually only 2-6 stitches wide and perhaps 8-10 stitches tall max.  The background behind them needs more tent stitches for the woodwork although I will probably do the facing shelf trim in another stitch.  I'm still thinking that part over.  

I've done a little stitching on the bottles already with a doubled strand of Bijoux (a thin metallic) in #470 Black Pearl.  This is a very dark charcoal colored metallic.   The black areas on the three bottles on the top shelf are almost finished.   The black areas on the three mostly black bottles on the second shelf from the top are stitched.  I've also done the black area on the green label on the gray bottle but I can see I probably need to go over those tent stitches and make them cross stitches instead.  I'll wait to decide whether to do that until the green label itself is finished.

Generally speaking I wouldn't use all metallics for background areas like this but I want the bottles and glasses to stand out, so I'l going to use mostly metallic threads for the bottles and glasses and see how this looks.  I'll stitch some of the wooden shelf background behind the top shelf once I choose a brown thread and see how it looks before I stitch any more bottles, though.  Don't want to rip out all of them if this doesn't work with the background thread.

I may have too many bottles of beer, but I ain't stupid!

The bottom shelf is wine glasses and other glasses but the second shelf up has a square item.  I can' t decide if it is the liquor license or a photograph or a square bottle of some fancy liquor....

I'll leave you to ponder the issue while I get to work finishing Nancy's Schnauzer pet guardian angel!

"98 bottles of beer on the wall, 98 bottles of beer; take one down and pass it around, 97 bottles of beer....

ON THE WALL."

LOL

Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow
Blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com
Archived Yahoo 360 postings at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chillyhollow

1 comment:

NCPat said...

Great ideas for the corners! I like the bottles so far and agree they too should be shiny. On the bottom shelf, I vote that it is a picture. You would not be able to read a license, if it were a bottle--it is missing hte neck, so it must be the photo. Just my humble opinion!!