If you hang out at vintage clothing and fabric stores, you'll be familiar with barkcloth. I always associated it with the 1940s but a quick search showed me that it was popular in the 1950s-1970s. Barkcloth is a heavy (upholstry weight) cotton fabric that is slightly ribbed. It was used for curtains, pilows and casual chair coverings when I was a child and gave a tropical feel to a room. In my area I see the vintage fabric recycled into tote bags and pillows. Here is a fabric site with a good selection of reproduction fabric in typical patterns.
http://www.jandofabrics.com/products.asp?id=18&PageIndex=2&PageSize=12&viewall=True
When I looked at my Leigh South Seas Dynasty ornament (the original unstitched canvas is shown above), barkcloth was what I thought of. Doesn't the right side of the ornament look like fabric to you? The areas that aren't black have washes of color on top of the sea green NP canvas. I don't want to loose that shading and I want to make this look slightly ribbed so I choose to lay long stitches horizontally across just the green areas with one ply of Thread Gatherer's Seaform Green (a sea green-blue-olive green mix). These stitches do not cover the black areas. I will handle them differently.
The photo above shows what I have so far. I am busy couching down the silk with Accentuate 331 which is an opalescent white. The couching stitches are in a sort of brick stitch pattern, which is often referred to as Burden Stitch. It's slow going. I have to make sure I don't mess up the pattern as I jump from area to area. I started work by doing one long vertical line of couching stitches across the widest part of the area that covered as many green spots as possible. Now I'm working each section based off that. It's very slow going. You have to be careful not to pull the couching stitches too tightly or the long horizontal stitches are pulled out of straight lines.
It's not only basketweave that is slow and boring stitching!
Speaking of which, I am still working on the border of Cape Cod Dogs. I made the mistake of working on the outside padded red border last night when tired and realized I was slanting the / stitches over the Very Velvet padding the wrong way and had to pull out one length of thread. Oh, well, ripping out just reminds me not to stitch when tired. It's a lesson I need to relearn periodically!
Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow
Blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com
Archived Yahoo 360 postings at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chillyhollow
