Jane's Leafy Adventure, Part One

Cha Unstitched

I have been stitching leaves for nearly a week now.

If you look at the photo of the unstitched canvas above, you will see the variety of leaves on this piece.  There are ten leaves on Cha, most of which have the same thick toffee brown vein down the middle. However, two rounded small leaves have a light green thin vein and a pointed larger leaf also has the same vein treatment.

I had to decide what shades of green to use, what stitches and whether all the leaves were to be stitched the same way.  Eventually, as I discussed in the Let's Talk Green posting on June 25, I choose to use three shades of green.  Very dark green is used only in the centers of the magnolia flowers.  Medium green and an overdye yellow-green are my leaf colors.  Since I choose light coverage stitching for the leaves and am just using one ply of my floss-type threads there, I can limit the number of colors I use. The shading of the leaves will show through the stitches and enhance and shade the thread colors I use.

I finally decided to group the 10 leaves into three groups which are the two small rounded leaves next to the partial flower; the leaves under the fruit cluster plus all the leaves near the large flower; except for the pointed leaf with the light green vein.  That leaf is the third type and is in a group by itself.

Today I'm going to talk about the two small round leaves near the partial flower.  They are small and should recede so I decided to use the same small-scale round stitch I used on the peach and plum (see the June 27 blog posting for details).  I treated the two leaves as one unit and continued the stitch from one leaf in a row into the next instead of working each separately as I did the flower petals.  Note that the stitch was done in horizontal rows with the canvas held upright.  I used only the medium green Splendor (one ply) for these leaves as the bulk of the color is medium green.  Once the two leaves were stitched, I used my yellow-green overdye to stem stitch the veins right on top of my first layer of stitches.  I didn't even have to refer to my color copy of the canvas as I could see the veins through my stitches.

Three Veins Stitched

Tomorrow I'll talk about the other leaves.  By the way, I only have one leaf left to stitch.  I hope to finish it today and then attempt to get a third of the background completed before I start on the bird.

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