Cat Topiary Garden: Two Missing Bushes

dede Odgen's Cat Topiary Garden

Last week I planned to basketweave the egg shaped topiary while I pondered how to stitch the large bush to its right.  As I worked on Egg, I realized just how much of the large bush is behind the trellis arch, which means it needs to recede.  I don't want any bush hogging the limelight when the arch and gate are more important!  So I decided that I would basketweave the big bush, too. Above you see how they turned out.  I like the contrast of the smooth basketweave on the egg shaped bush and how the bigger bush looks compared to the ones behind it.  Now I need a rough-textured stitch for the big fish, bird, cat and mouse topiary bushes.

Remember, I used just two plies of my flosses in the basketweaved bushes.  I tried three plies but the stitches looked uneven and a bit twisted, which is always a sign you have too much thread in the needle.  I suppose that the tulle layered on top of the canvas means I need to use a little less thread since normally three plies of floss look good when I basketweave on 18 count.  But your own stitch tension also comes into play, making it hard to know exactly how many plies each of us needs to use.

I also "needle blended" colors, which is a fancy way of saying that I used two plies of my teal green thread in the teal green areas and two plies of the dark teal in the shadowed areas, then used one ply of each color in the areas between the very light and dark spaces to mix the colors.  You can get very elaborate with needle blending, working from four plies of AAAA to three plies of AAA plus one of B to two plies of AA plus two of BB, etc. but I didn't really need to be that subtle here.

Two Yellow-Olive Bushes Behind Gate

After I finished the two bushes I took a good look at my canvas.  I discovered I'd completely overlooked two small yellow-olive bushes that lurk behind the lattice gate.  I left my magnet and needle on the canvas on top of one of them in the first big photo so you won't overlook them also.  I found a yellow-olive size #5 silk perle (Rainbow Gallery's Grandeur G848) in my stash, and after some thought, decided skip tent stitch might be just the thing to use. In the photos above and below you see how they turned out.

By the way, here is how Ruth Schmuff does Skip Tent.  She calls it Basketweave Twill since it is done on the diagonal like basketweave is.  If you do it in horizontal rows, it's called skipped tent.
http://www.notyourgrandmothersneedlepoint.com/2010/06/one-of-my-favorite-stitches.html

If you are stitching along with me, any #5 perle in approximately the right shade looks good here.  If your canvas is 13 count, you may want to use #3 perle but try it first to see if the little stitch bumps are going to be too prominent with the larger #3 size.

In the photos you can just see that I've started the big central topiary bush.  I'll talk about the stitch I choose for it next time.  Hint: I am using a variation of a stitch I used in this blog post.

Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow
Blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com
and at http://chstitchguides.blogspot.com