Robin (And Amy Bunger) Help With the Dog's Ear

Wednesday when I posted the photo on the left to Blog, I got a nice note from Robin King, who is Amy Bunger's webmaster and who also teaches at Amy's shop. Robin let me know that she had just uploaded a photo of Amy's latest Home Study canvas to the Amy Bunger website and she thought one of the techniques Amy used on the Nativity shepherd piece would work well for the ear of the Cape Cod dog I'm stitching. Here's the link to the photo Robin told me about--

http://www.amybunger.com/albums/album_image/6366238/5301486.htm

Look at the lamb the shepherd is holding. Robin sent me this close up later in the day of the little lamb's ears. Amy did them in needle weaving. Robin thought perhaps I might want to consider needle weaving the ear on my dog. So last night I took out some of my Burmilana and doodled various ears on the edges of my canvas. I tried detached buttonhole instead of needle weaving first. This makes it look easy but I think I need a framework at least on the sides.
http://www.brazilian-dimensional-embroidery.org/stitch_instructions.htm

Like this.
http://www.stitchopedia.com/ButtonholeStitchDetached.html

These two blogs talk about the pitfalls you run into doing detatched buttonhole. I decided that my Burmilana is just too thin to do detached buttonhole successfully. I can barely see the previous row's buttonhole to stitch through it for the next row!
http://juststring.blogspot.com/2008/11/stitch-study-1-detached-buttonhole.html

http://jowynn.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/the-knotted-detached-buttonhole-stitch/

So I looked up needleweaving in Jo I. Christensen's Needlepoint Book. It's on page 367 of the 1999 version if you own this wonderful reference book. Basically you put in two parallel lines as a foundation, then do a herringbone stitch over them, weaving back and forth.

It makes one nice raised ridge, but this is not the version of needleweaving that Amy did on on the little sheep. Robin, with Amy's permission, kindly sent me the diagram of her way of doing this stitch above. Click on the photo to see a larger version. I've been testing needleweaving in the margins of my canvas to see how it looks with my Burmilana and how many strands I should use if I put it on top of the already stitched dog's ear. Hopefully by tomorrow I will have come to some conclusions about the two versions of needleweaving (Jo Christensen's and Amy Bunger's) as they apply to my canvas and threads. Testing is essential at this stage because every stitch, no matter how wonderful, won't work with every design and thread.

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