Today we have an online art exhibit featuring the work of Harvey Kravis, who loves interpreting art through needlepoint. Harvey's first original piece was a backgammon board designed when he was in college. Several years later he designed and completed a piece based on a Jack Daniels label in his mid-20s. It took three months for him to chart it on graph paper, since it involved complex lettering and many curlicues (with plenty of pencil erasing along the way). Courtship, marriage, and two kids led to a break of 27 years before designing again, resulting in the King of Spades, otherwise known to him as “the Flat King”
Harvey normally uses a 27 inch wide scroll frame --he's used the same one for fifty years!-- as many of his "masterpiece" projects are very big and can take as long as 3-4 years to complete. He works with Paternayan and Appleton tapestry wools and now uses Stitchcraft software to chart the art masterpieces. He generally stitches an average of one and a half hours a day. Some days he does much more; some less. The number of color changes involved in a section mean that sometimes he will only get 20 stitches done in an hour. Other times he can do 200-300 stitches an hour if everything is one color. Harvey says the key is to organize the threads by color number in plastic baggies so it's easy to find the color that he needs to work with next.
I asked Harvey if he ends a thread after he finishes with that color or if he slides the thread under the stitched area toward the next place where that color will be used. He answered, "I snake under nearby stitches every time I switch colors. I use a single needle for the entire project. It’s constantly an optimization issue to figure out what the next stitch should be. If I don’t put some strategy/thought into it I will waste yarn. If I have to skip more than 8-10 stitch positions I will snake and cut."
If you have a Facebook account, you can browse some of Harvey's work on his FB page.
If you have plenty of time, watch this 2022 YouTube video presentation about his work, which includes the things he learned from stitching, how he organizes his threads, why frames are important to his stitching and an explanation of the StitchCraft software he uses to graph the designs before he starts stitching. The presentation was to a mainly Chinese-speaking audience in the Boston area. You can skip the introduction in Mandarin and English by starting the video at the 5:00 mark. I would encourage you to listen to the questions at the end as you'll learn a lot about the challenges in creating these large designs for stitching.
The framer Harvey talks about in the video is Picture Yourself! in Massachusetts. Here is their website.
If you want to learn more about StitchCraft (Windows operating systems only), you can explore their website. Remember Harvey's warning that the software underestimates the amount of yarn needed for very large pieces!
I asked Harvey what he's working on now. He's tackling Seurat's "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte." WHEW.
Many thanks to Harvey for allowing me to bring his needlepoint to Blog's readers.
Written by Jane/Chilly HollowBlogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com
and at http://chstitchguides.blogspot.com
© Copyright June 2, 2023 Jane M. Wood. All rights reserved.
