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| Brick Stitch on Head |
Last time I showed you my Leigh Designs Pharaoh Ramses II, I was stitching away on the statue. I'd chosen to use brick stitch over two for the coronet on top of the Pharaoh's head, then tent stitches on the rest of him. The photo above shows my progress.
I swear that the tent stitches on his face and the brick stitches on top of his head are the same color of DMC cotton. They are even done from the same skein, so there are no dye lot color changes. What you see is the play of light on the straight brick stitches versus less light bouncing off Pharaoh's face. There is a darker terra-cotta color in DMC cotton but it was too red to use, so my only option is to rip out the brick stitches, even though I like the texture of them on his headpiece.
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| All Tent Stitches |
I ended up with what you see above. It's much better. I still really like brick stitch, however, so I used it on the cream and gold stripes on the left side. It's running in a horizontal fashion. I just turned the canvas on its side so Pharaoh was lying down to stitch it smoothly.
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| More Brick Stitch—and More Ripping |
And that's too much texture! Sigh I'm going to have to rip the brick stitches out and try for a smoother look that doesn't detract from the fan and statue. Oh, well, on the bright side I managed to do basketweave on the cream section at the top under the ornament hardware and in the lime section of the fan. I had originally planned something else for the lime sections of the fan but I don't have lime in the threads I plan to use. Given the difficulty of shopping for it, I opted to use tent stitches for the lime.
By the way, the lime area is done in size 8 perle cotton but I had to rip out the size 8 perle cotton section in ecru. The ecru thread seemed thicker than the lime, even though they are both size 8. The lime is from Prescencia and the ecru is from DMC, so probably the manufacturer of one makes a skinner version of size 8 than the other. Not to worry, I used three plies of DMC cotton floss in ecru and that looks good.
Plans change all the time as I stitch. Sometimes things don't work, sometimes I can't get threads or embellishments I want. So needlepoint embellishment for me is always changing and evolving to meet my mental idea of what I want a painted canvas to be. This involves a lot of ripping out but sometimes you don't know what it will look like until you try and sometimes the threads surprise you. On Pharaoh the threads and stitches certainly threw me a lot of curve balls!
Stay tuned to see what surprises the threads and stitches have for me next time.
By the way, I have listed all the postings about this design on the Chilly Hollow Stitch Guides blog so you can easily follow along as I blog stitch this.
https://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com/2020/08/pharoahs-fan-finished.html
Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow
Blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com
and at http://chstitchguides.blogspot.com
© Copyright June 26, 2020 Jane M. Wood. All rights reserved.
