Jane Has Gone Stitching

I've Gone Stitching. While I'm working this week I've been listing to this New Jersey shop's Internet radio program. It comes out each Monday and there are six episodes to date. I'm listening to the interview with Julia of Julia's Needleworks right now. What fun!
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/gone-stitching

I'm also over at Marianne's blog, "Needlepoint in the 21st Century," collaborating with her on a cute 4x6 piece of what may be the Loch Ness monster. It is going to be fun, even if Marianne is already referring to me as Groucho....
http://needlepoint.storeblogs.com/2009/08/10/where-i-crow-a-bit

Not to worry. With the Internet I can be all these places and still home at night working on Cape Cod Dogs!

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

The Face That Launched A Thousand Headaches

The littlest mermaid has a face and curly red hair now. The face gave me fits. I stitched all the skin first, thinking I would then add the features but nothing worked. So I ripped it all out and restitched in my darker skin tone color since I was out of the medium shade, but I didn't stitch over the painted eyes and mouth and nose. The dark face looked odd but after I added the straight stitch of a nose (one ply), the green eyes (some of the mermaid tail dark forest green) and a little red mouth, then outlined the chin with brown and added eyebrows, she looked better. I took one ply of my lightest skin color and overstitched the dark brown tent stitches of her face and she suddenly looked better. Give her hair in French knots using the red boucle, add a few straight stitches in the boucle to give her longer hair on her shoulders and there she is! Sorry about the long green thread. I didn't realize that had fallen on the scanner but I don't have time to correct this or I won't get this article written!

As you can see, I've been working on the little dog's face (he has brown eyes and a brown nose now) and the larger mermaid's tail. After completing the first pass of the Helen's Lace stitch (where I omitted stitching the central stitch in each horizontal or vertical set of stitches) I went back and added it in another thread - the sparkly green/gold/black Glamour #2500 by Madeira. This is a sewing machine thread which is a soft metallic made from six plies twisted together. The ends come untwisted in the needle's eye but you just leave an extra length of tail in the needle's eye and cut off the unraveled bit when you tie off this thread on the back.

After that, I have started stitching over the areas where each diagonal row of stitches meet with my dark green Petite Treasure Braid #PB53 and attaching a blue/green Magnifica bead (Mill Hill bead #10079) over where the Madeira thread stitches meet with the same thread. Do you think it is too sparkly? In person it livens up the piece which Margaret said was getting too dark, not realizing that the entire design is dark. I have carefully matched the colors of the painted canvas to my threads, so I am stitching this as painted. It is the inside of a bar, after all. The only bright spot is the window and the liquor bottles behind the bar which are in the sunshine of the window.

I hope to finish both mermaid tails tonight. After that I need to do the tarty blonde's hair.

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