Auditions and Rehearsals

I've been talking exclusively about repairing the burn damage on Rabbit Geisha but there is another area in this canvas that gave me a lot of worry--how plain it is.

If you look at the photo in the left column of the entire unstitched canvas, you see that the design has these elements:  the rabbit face and hands, the two ribbons and the tassel, the decorative sleeves, the over tunic and the under robe, and finally the blue background.  Each of these main elements has other things in it (one ribbon is gold edged and the other is not; the tunic has a curved line and dot trim) but those decorative bits are fairly sparse.

This is a problem for me as I usually look at those decorative elements as well as the shape of the area I am going to stitch to get ideas for stitches.   The only real decoration is the fan shapes on the sleeves.  I think the squiggles and dots on the over tunic are not really large enough to base anything on.  So this canvas is a pretty open one without much to help me decide on stitches that'll look good.

I had to do a LOT of test stitching which you'll see in the photo above.  Those are mostly stitches I was auditioning for the part of Background Stitch.  The entire canvas is 7x13 inches, which means it is tall and thin.  So I looked for tall stitches like the double column in the middle of the design or the interlocking L shapes in the upper right hand corner.  I also decided to try the Ming Variation stitch that failed to work out in the sky so spectacularly on my South Seas Fiji ornament.  I really like Ming Variation (it is the second row of stitches from the top) but once again it turned out to be not right for the part.

I got fairly desperate and tried a lot of things before I came up with the split pavilion stitch I am using for the background.  First, here is the normal pavilion stitch.
http://www.needlepoint.org/StitchOfTheMonth/2001/01-08j.php

I saw a lovely version of this in one of Brenda Hart's books (Favorite Stitches, page 31, split diamond variation).  In my test stitching it is to the left of the double column stitch and is offset split pavilions with each row separated by a complex row or two of horizontal stitches.  I knew that as Miss I Can't Count To Ten Successfully, I'd never get this stitch right so I experimented to find a variation of it that was easier.  The two small split pavilions diagonally below Brenda's complicated version were what I came up with but they are too small in scale.  They just are too little for this large canvas.  I tried again and you see the larger split pavilions underneath the other versions in the second row from the bottom.

That's what I went with, turning the canvas so I could work these in a vertical manner, and doing a row of the top halves of the split pavilions, then coming back the other way with a row of the bottom half.  These all interlock nicely as you see below.

This stitch takes a lot of thread so I'm going to have to buy more DMC cotton floss.  I have three skeins of color 794, all of which I bought this week as the skein I had in the right color is Anchor and I can't buy Anchor locally (note to self:  update the total stash credits) but the area above already has used up one of them.  To be fair, I am also using the same thread for the three rows of tent stitch around the perimeter which also eats up a lot of thread.  I think I'll need 8-9 skeins of DMC 794 to do the background.  Better go shopping!

By the way, once I chose the right stitch in auditions, I had to do rehearsals to know how many threads I needed to look good on 18 count.  I ended up with four plies in my background split pavilions and four also in my tent stitches.

Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow
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