Last night I completed the sky in a variation of Ming stitch (Page 91 of Brenda Hart's Stitches for the Millennium) using one ply of my Thread Gatherer's overdyed silk (color Seafoam Green). As you can see, I stitched right over the palm tree fronds. If I'm careful and use a sharp needle, the fronds can be stitched on top of the background stitches without disturbing them.
However, Liz thinks that perhaps the Ming Variation #3 stitch is too large in scale. I will think about this today and just work on Glittering Kimono couching of my H-Q rows. I don't know if Liz is right or not but if I decide she is, this is the time to rip out. I don't want to do palm fronds until I am sure about the stitch they go on top of. As usual when I am thinking about a stitch, I will work on another item and put this one up where I can see it as I walk around the house. Eventually I will decide whether Liz is right. Scale is very important in needlework. If the background stitch is too large, the piece will be an irritant. So I'll take time to think this over. Thanks for the critique, Liz! We can get too close to our stitching and not see how good/bad it is! I love getting comments from Blog readers as otherwise I have no input on my stitching at all. There are no other needlepointers near me in Chilly Hollow.
Anyone else have thoughts about the sky background stitch?
The other thing I worked on last night is the white foam on the edges of the waves rolling into the beach. My canvas came with a two page stitch guide. I used the threads list to guide me in choosing threads (but I didn't follow it completely). I have not used any of the stitch suggestions until now. The guide suggests using detached buttonhole for the white foam. I deviated from that slightly in that I used regular buttonhole (one ply of my white Splendor silk used for the sandy beach in the background mixed with one strand of white Accentuate #311) to stitch the foam lines from left to right. In certain areas I added a tiny French knot where the foam needed to be thicker as it spilled over the top of an incoming wave.
I have to admit it was hard to keep the silk and Accentuate strands even in the needle. This was slow going but I like the end result. It doesn't overwhelm the water and looks real to me.
The white Accentuate was a new thread so I added one more stash credit point to my tally which stands at 25 now. It amazes me how many threads I use on a piece and how I rarely use up a thread from my stash. I must mix a lot of small sections of each thread. But as I am a threadaholic, I would expect no less.
Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow
Blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com
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