I have apologies to make this morning. First of all, those of you who read Blog at the Yahoo 360 site are wondering why on earth a) there are two postings entitled "Musing On Wings While De-Icing;" b) why I haven't deleted one of them; and c) how I come up with these crazy titles. The answers are a) I don't know. I only posted once. b) Yahoo 360 won't let me delete the duplicate. It just says "URL not found" no matter which one I try to erase. I've made seven attempts to remove a duplicate but I guess we are going to just live with it. As for c) Crazy lady naturally equals crazy titles. It just happens. They pop into my head and if they aren't too wild, I type them.
Anyone whose short term memory hasn't been destroyed by stress due to their entire yard, driveway, porch and house being covered by 1/4 of solid ice, thus making them stay home for three days in a row with nothing to do but clean house (Thank you, Lord, for my stash) and attempt to remove said ice (fruitlessly--Mother Nature is bigger than me) will remember that yesterday I was excited by the pretty stitches Joan Thomasson used for her Barbara angel wings. They'll also remember that I was going to use leafy stitches in rows bordered by metallic for the wings on my Baroque Fish.
You'll notice that the wings above bear absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to Joan's fancy angel wings. I apologize.
What happened? Well, I discovered that pretty rows of leaves need to be on the horizontal. The fish has diagonal wings / so that my leaves were always having to be adjusted. If I'd really looked at Barbara angel on Joan Thomasson's website, I would have noticed that the wings were pointing down, not to the side. Since part of the charm of this stitch is its regularity is the regular rows, my squeezed and abbreviated and tilted this way and that leaf rows looked weird.
Kandy Merrac's angels deserve better, so I went looking for inspiration elsewhere. After all, I'm stitching all six of her angels for the ANG Auction, and although I want to use the fabulous clothing stitches, the halos and wings are all alike and I don't want to repeat myself six times. That way lies Stitching Burnout. My January 2009 Needle Pointers magazine from ANG has all the exhibit winners from the last Seminar, so I thought I'd look at the pretty pictures and maybe find something feathery looking for the fish. I found it on page 34 in the lovely purple Peony Ribbons piece designed by Betty Chen Louis and stitched by Lee McLeron. The ribbon on the far right uses a variation on Milanese stitch to great effect. (It might be Oriental Stitch but I'm not certain.) I don't have enough room on Baroque Fish's wings to have that much space between the diagonal rows of triangles but regular Milanese stitch worked nicely. I simply alternated colors from Splendor green #S880 and Splendor blue #S865 in each row. In person the blue rows are more prominent although this changes according to how you tilt the piece in the light. Carole Lake explains the Milanese stitch very well on her website.
http://www.carolelake.com/Stitches/Milanese.htm
The sleeve is in the green and the bodice in the blue. The collar and cuffs are lazy daisy stitches (in Tiara T109) over a base of three long stitches using my pale green #5 perle cotton that is on the front lower skirt of the gown. The Tiara frays easily so use short lengths of 8-10 inches max. The bows on the sleeve and at the neckline are my blue Splendor. The final touch is the long lines of my Kreink 1/8 inch ribbon in green that highlight the bodice. Actually, this looks wrong to me. I probably am going to remove these stitches and use the silver in the halo instead (Kreinik #4 braid in 4005) to make the scale right. The ribbon is too wide next to those small stitches. I also plan to add a bit more to the bow at the neckline as it isn't very prominent in the design. Another little ribbon end pointing out into the background should fix that.
The moral of it all is not to pick stitches when you are exhausted and stressed. You forget to study the stitch you like to see if it is suitable for the area you need to fill. This is why I'm not doing anything that takes any brain power until the ice storm is over and my routine restored.
My page view counter at Yahoo 360 just hit 694007 -- boy do I have a lot of apologies to make!
Jane/Chilly Hollow
Main blog at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow
