Once the sky stitch was the proper size to look good with the rest of my South Seas Fiji design, the only things left were the tree and the metallic hanger at the top of the ornament. I've decided that I want to frame this piece with a mat cut out in a circle so that looking at South Seas Fiji is like looking through a peephole. It should be a glimpse at Paradise in my mind. So I won't be stitching the top of the ornament. I'll probably just put a row of tent stitches all around the perimeter.
That leaves the palm tree fronds unstitched. I started them yesterday but didn't talk about them. Donna, that's why the top of the tree looked so faint yesterday. I had just started the stitching and didn't make that clear in what I wrote. If you look at yesterday's photo, you can see the darker fronds stitched with a ply of the same dark forest green Splendor (#S907) I used for the tree line in the background. I am doing stem stitch for the fronds. It gives me a thin line since I am just using one ply of silk. I topped the line and filled it out with a strand of dark green Petite Treasure Braid #P853. This adds sparkle to the tree while the dark silk underneath gives a shadow. It takes a long time to stem stitch the fronds with such a thin thread but I think building up the fronds slowly works best.
In the photo above you can see that I've started working on the lighter colored fronds using a medium green Splendor in color S906. Once I finish all the fronds (using the color copy of the plain unstitched canvas as my guide) I will go back and add a ply of Sparkle Braid (a thin metallic strand similar in size to my Petite Treasure Braid) in color SK08 on top. Then I will have to decide whether to use an even lighter color of Splendor to add more highlights and shadows. I'm playing with color and texture here, trying to make the palm tree memorable and realistic, too.
Wish me luck! I'm going to add three more threads to my thread stash count....
Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow
Blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com
Archived Yahoo 360 postings at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chillyhollow
