Last night I put the finishing touches on my version of Kandace Merric's Victorian Parakeet. I backstitched a bit around the winged hands and the parakeet's head with my grey Medici, then added a halo using the three metallics I have already used in this project--Caron's orange Snow, the Kreinik purple with orange highlights that inspired the color scheme, and a bit of dark purple Accentuate #140.
I'd already used the Accentuate on the purple skirt area but not mentioned it to you. If you look back at earlier photos of the Victorian Parakeet, the purple skit seemed to have bare canvas showing through the areas where the stepped stitch used in most of this design met. The orange areas, that use the same stitch oriented in a different direction, didn't have this bare spot. I'm not sure why this appeared in the vertical stitch orientation and not in the horizontal. Usually it's upright stitches where you don't have full coverage. You can take a length of #8 perle cotton and stitch a diagonal sittch on 18 count NP canvas and it'll cover ok, but that same thread on the same count canvas in a stitch that is vertical may not cover. That's something you take into account when you switch threads called for in a stitch guide. You might have to use a more plies for the upright stitches if the substitute thread is skinnier than the original. Play around with this on your scrap canvas using a Mosaic stitch and a bargello stitch and you'll see what I mean.
That doesn't seem to have happened here, but I've always heard that very dark colors make thread slightly thinner. My purple silk is Soie d'Alger and I think the orange silk is also. Could it be the number of times the purple silk had to go through the chemicals of the dye bath to achieve that rich royal purple made the plies a bit thinner than the orange silk? May be. If I'd noticed ahead of time I could have used 5 plies of silk in the purple areas instead of 4, but I didn't.
That's where the purple Accentuate came in--I back stitched with a doubled strand of it right over the bare areas. If you squint at the photo you'll see the purple metallic in the skirt.
I've really enjoyed stitching Kandace Merric's Victorian Parakeet. For some reason, I'm the only person who volunteered to stitch a parakeet so I wanted her to be extra special, with deep, rich colors and a slightly different halo to make her stand out from the rest as much as possible. I hope I suceeded! This was a challenging stitch --that braid trim was hard to do, I had trouble at first getting the right look to the parakeet's wings and head, those durn bare spots in the skirt--but I think I overcame the challenges and I don't always want to stitch an easy piece. I like challenge with my NP, thank you very much!
Kandace Merric delivers with fascinating designs and interesting stitches, and I have had a very good time with the Medieval Cat and now the Victorian Parakeet in the Household Pet Guardian Angel series.
Next up--the Baroque Fish!
Jane/Chilly Hollow
Main blog at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow
