I actually finished Cha's left wing Sunday but since I needed to do more background last night I waited to post about it until this morning.
The left wing is done all in River Silks silk ribbon. I am holding off deciding whether to do anything else to the left wing until I finish the right wing, but since I have plenty of background to do before I can start the other wing, I am going to leave you in suspense.
While I tent stitch you can read what the River Silks website says about starting/ending their ribbons. It's very interesting and works quite well.
http://www.riversilks.com/stitch_instruction.html
Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow Blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com Archived Yahoo 360 postings at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chillyhollow
4 comments:
Thanks for the link to River Silks! I browsed through their gallery and came away with lots of ideas for a floral canvas that is in my stash. Cha is looking lovely. I have a question about your tent stitch background. I thought that tent stitch tended to distort the canvas or is that not an issue since you have it on stretcher bars? I have memories of my grandmother teaching me tent stitch and going back and forth across the canvas and having it end up looking something like a parallelogram. My other question is what is the size of your Cha canvas? Lots of questions for this early in the day!
Easy question first--Cha is a big canvas. The design itself is 12 inches square and she is mounted on four 16 inch stretcher bars. She is on my floor stand half the time since the stretcher bars are the thick heavy ones.
Tent stitches (when they are half cross or continential) do distort the background. I have one leopard spot pillow that I blocked five times and never did get quite square. Continental is the worst offender in my opinion, so I am using half cross stitches for the background. I can't use basketweave, which helps minimize the distortion because that would make streaks from my overdyed thread. So I am very very careful with my stitch tension, covering each thread with a fat little stitch that is like all the others and not pulled too tightly or left too loose. I also use stretcher bars and the heavy ones. For a large piece I feel that the thicker stretcher bars are better as I can put in more staples to secure the canvas and keep it square.
All these things help but I am sure that once off the stretcher bars Cha may still need slight blocking. Fortunately, River Silks ribbon is color fast.
My own opinion is that the use of stretcher bars helps immensely but you have to do everything with stitch tension and stitch choice to also minimize the problem.
Cha is becoming quite the looker! The ribbon adds to the richness of the body and is stunning!
Thanks, Pat. I like how she is developing and have ideas about the body now.
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