Jane Goes to the Beach

After last night's excitement waiting to hear how well the Pet Guardian Angels did at Auction (they raised $500 for ANG, thanks to the effort of the stitchers who brought them to life and to Kandace Merric, their incredible designer who designed and stitched two brand new angels herself), you can imagine I couldn't do any of the H-Q rows on my Glittering Kimono. I couldn't concentrate!

I did work on the beach area of the South Seas Fiji piece after I finished the last of the black tent stitches on the right side. The hard part was finding the right threads for the complex stitch I choose. The stitch is called Diagonal Wave and I found it on page 42 of Brenda Hart's "Favorite Stitches." I wanted a stitch that simulated the curved shapes you get when a wave comes onto the beach and then goes out again. This is a perfect choice.

Diagonal Wave is meant to be stitched in three different types of thread. I pulled out 7-8 different threads in the sandy color I wanted and tried a few in the margin of the canvas. My "try out" stitching where I auditioned threads is shown in the photo above. You can see the mistake I made in the first wide row, too. Auditioning stitches and threads makes good sense because you find out where you are likely to make mistakes, not just what stitches and threads work well in your current design!

What you see in the photo is two of the three rows that make up Diagonal Wave. (The third row in Diagonal Wave is tent stitches that follow the curve, which I didn't bother to stitch with those as I could already tell what would and would not work from my batch of possibilities.) The bottom wider row is done in Silk Lame Braid and the top narrower one in Impressions. I decided both threads were too heavy for the design. After all, the sandy beach is not supposed to overwhelm the palm tree. So I auditioned a second set of threads. They turned out to be perfect.

In this photo you see the beach half stitched. I used two plies of Dinky Dyes (a six ply silk from Australia--website below) in color #154 "Cottesloe" for the bulk of the beach.

http://www.dinkydyes.iinet.net.au/new_silk%20page.htm

The darker wet sand nearest the wave is stitched in two plies of Gloriana overdyed silk #107 "Honey Bronze."

http://www.glorianathreads.com/Silk_Floss.html

I tried to manipulate the Gloriana overdyed silk so that the darkest parts covered the darkest painted areas. In the photo above you see both the stitched right side and the original painted canvas on the unstitched left side. By the way, the third row of the Diagonal Wave stitch is tent stitches, using one ply of my Dinky Dyes silk mixed with two strands of thin metallic Accentuate #022 for this row. (And yes, I have updated my stash credit number on the left side of the page with my three new threads. I will be curious to see how high I can get the number before the end of the year.)

I am quite happy with how this stitched up. The beach isn't too heavy compared with the right side of the design and it won't overwhelm the central motif of the palm tree. I know because once the beach was finished, I stitched the trunk of the palm tree in stem stitch using a strand of Treasure Braid TR298 in the 12-strand size. There are a few long stitches to fill in and add highlights in Bijoux, which is a thin metallic a bit heavier than Accentuate. I used a bronze color. My spool doesn't have the number on it, so I can't tell you the precise color. The Bijoux doesn't show up well in the photo but in person it gives a lighter effect where the sun hits the trunk.

Here is the finished beach and palm tree. I need to do the background line of beach and trees, then I will think about stitching the water and waves, and probably end with the sky. Once all that is done, I can do the fronds of the palm tree which are on top of all the other stitching.

And I might do a few rows of H-Q on Glittering Kimono, too!

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