Luna Grounded

Luna Unstitched

No, Luna the Vampire has not been sent to her room.  I'm sure she has been a very bad girl indeed, but I'm not about to go there.  Passing judgement on a needlepoint canvas character is a sign of something that isn't really healthy, right?

I'm talking about how to stitch a ground for Luna to stand on.  I mentioned earlier that the canvas design already reads "ground" when you look at it.  Check out the bare unstitched canvas above.  See what I mean?

But I still wanted something there, something solid.  You may want to look at Rachel's posting about how she handled this same problem with a Paddington Bear she stitched.  She cleverly changed the color of her background stitch to indicate ground.
http://www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk/wordpress/2010/10/12/a-bear-called-paddington/

However, I'm not going to stitch Luna's background. I think I probably will leave the custom gray canvas with the speckles unstitched.  So that solution won't work for me.  Ok, what kinds of things do you find on the ground in graveyards?

Bad Tombstone Stitch!

Paving stones!  So I stitched block stitches.  I think they look very much like ground in an unobtrusive way.  I used a ply from the six ply Planet Earth Fibers line of silk floss.  I like how it turned out.  However, I am not happy with the stitch on the cracked tombstone.  It's too prominent.  A friend pointed out that I have two tombstones and a bird in that area to deal with and I might want to make at least one of them very muted.  So out came the tombstone stitches and I have something else in mind.  I also decided to add one more paving stone to the ground.  Here's what I ended up with.

Final Ground Treatment

What do you think?  Note that I have not added rows of compensated stitches around Luna's hem or at the very bottom of the canvas.  I decided that would not look as good as what we have here.

A suggestion of ground is sometimes enough.  But now I'm wondering if I should take that last paving stone out again....

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