Approaching the Border Carefully

I worked on Fan's kimono again last night but I didn't accomplish much since I was fiddling around with some of the photo options on the new computer.  I took a photo of Fan (right) just to see how well the built-in camera works.  What do you think?  Yes, I know it's a mirror image of the canvas.  I can't find how to change that in my fancy new photo editing software.

Back to the kimono.  The whole thing has a very thin black outline around each arm. The body is divided from the sleeve by it, for example.  I've held back stitching the column that this outline on the body until I get the sleeve done, then I will be able to see where the two columns meet exactly and plan how I compensate each area's column where the two meet.

Once the whole thing is stitched, I might do a few back stitches here and there to reinforce the lines, but that needs to wait until the end.  Butterfly's face has a pink backstitch outline and I think Fan's left sleeve might need some around the bottom rounded edge.  I'm not going to decide until I have everything stitched on Fan.  Anyone who has done a lot of XS will know exactly how this is done, but basically you just backstitch a line right over the border between the two areas that seems to need a little definition.

Days of Frustration with the Mexican Lady

Janet from La La Land is back with more details on the stitching of her Mexican Lady canvas. If you missed the introduction, she is working on an adaptation of a Linda Carter Holman painting from Melissa Shirley Designs. You can see the unstitched canvas below, courtesy of Laura Zickus who photographed it for Needle Nook of La Jolla’s website. Janet is working the 13 count version of this piece, although it is also available on 18 count needlepoint canvas.

http://www.needlenookoflajolla.com/storedir/proddetail.php?prod=ch118-2

Now here is Janet:

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“I’ve spent days stitching and then taking out a number of stitches for what I now call the “dratted stems.” After a number of false starts I realized what the problem was for me. The stems are a large dark slash across the canvas. If I used 3-4 different colors as called for in the painted canvas I knew I would draw too much attention to the stems. The focus of the canvas should not be the stems.

There are four different kinds of stems: Calla lily stems, the big green leaf’s stem (near Juanita’s face), the large green leaf stem in the foreground, and the rose stem. The stems are all close together. I used Splendor silk thread for all the stems.

1. I stitched the big green leaf stem in plain basketweave in two colors (S1062 for accent and S940 for the main part of the stem). I used an outline stitch to surround the stem to set if off from the others.
2. The rose stem has not yet been stitched.
3. The Calla lily stems did not lend themselves to basketweave as all you could see was a blob with no differentiation between the stems. So, I used a random long and short in two colors to add some variety without making the stems too important. Sounds easy, hmmm? After I got all the stems done in the top half I realized I had used too many plies. Oh frustration! Before I took them out I tried reducing the 5 plies to 4 plies in the bottom half and was very satisfied. So I removed the stitches from the top half and began replacing them. This is not yet completely finished but I have this Saturday deadline for Sunday’s blog entry so I photographed it as is. The colors are S1064 and S49.
4. The foreground’s green leaf stem was also stitched in two colors (basketweave) with no outline stitch. The colors are S1064 and S1062 for accent.

I have been looking at the flowers for some time and deciding what to do. I experimented with silk flowers for the roses and laid them on the canvas for you to see. We now have a 'mixed media' piece. They are not permanently affixed to the canvas, as I need to finish the rose stem and branch that the birds are sitting on. I’m not convinced this will be the final outcome for the roses. I will spend this next week working on the roses and the Calla lilies. I think the roses are a tad large but cannot make a final decision until I do the Calla lilies to determine the balance. If I do use the silk flowers I will have to take them apart layer by layer and trim a bit I think.

For all of you who have been following the progress of the Mexican Lady I appreciate your patience as I stitch, have problems to resolve, and discuss how I resolve those problems. You all can hear me muttering clear across the country.

Until next week then.”

Janet in La La Land

Note: This blog is also viewable at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow

More I Stitch, More Kimono

I've been busy moving photos from the old computer the last several days. Luckily, that means I have time to stitch while waiting for one photo to finish so I can start another. You'll see my progress on Fan's kimono above (or to the left, depending on which of my blogs you visit).

The left sleeve is done. After the I stitch all over the sleeve, I put a gold metallic cross stitch on the gold dots painted there and using two plies of my darkest green DMC cotton floss, I did a few long stitches to make the slightly shamrock-looking green symbols. The inner sleeves (rose areas)and the obi sash in the front are done already. I think I need to do all the orange kimono before I stitch the long yellow trim on the sleeves or the yellow band at her neck, as well as the green border of the lower left kimono edge near her little sandals. I plan to stitch the edges in long stitches and I think stitching them first and then doing the kimono orange body might disturb the long stitches. Since I want them perfectly smooth, I'll wait.

Once the sleeve was done, I started on the kimono bottom to the left of the green edging. I forgot to mention that when the I stitch comes to a gold dot, I skip it, but when the I stitch comes up and over a green shamrock, I put the orange thread right on top I'm just using two plies of orange NP Inc. silk so the green shows up. I'll know where to put them later. But for some reason the gold doesn't show well. Even though I skipped those dots of gold and didn't stitch on top of them, I still needed my color xerox of the original unstitched canvas to find them all. More color magic! Weird what colors do, isn't it?

I'm a bit more than half done with the main body of the kimono. Its I stitches slant / like the left tail side and the sleeve. When I get to the right sleeve, I change the slant to \ . What I'll do is take the printed page of Carole Lake's instructions of how to do the I stitch, scan it with my scanner into my image software, and reverse the image so it is a mirror image. If you don't have this equipment or software, just hold the back side of your printed page up to a sunny window. You'll see the instructions reversed and can just trace over them with a pencil. Once you do two columns of the I stitch, you won't need the instructions any more. You can just follow along.

I found another batch of pictures of the grandkids to copy so I hope to finish the kimono this weekend while I do that.

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My main blog address is
http://blog.360.yahoo.com.chillyhollow

Inexplicable Behavior, NP Edition

I read the Yarn Harlot’s blog quite often. She’s very funny--for a knitter--and I find a lot of the things she runs into (a stash that grows by leaps and bounds and yet never has what you need when you need it, for example) in her knitting life resonate in my needlepoint life. So I enjoy reading what she blogs. Just today I read something there that got me thinking. The Harlot is finishing a new book on knitting just now and is in the final edit stage. Pretty soon the book will be ready and she’ll go on tour to promote it.

She’s going to set up the book signings a bit differently and explains why this way:

“It is my experience, that people don't have a clue about knitters. They think that everything we do is pretty nutty. If you don't believe me, rent a mini-van and drive to another country for a sheep and wool festival with four knitting friends. Hell, just say you have "knitting friends" and watch ordinary people glaze over. I used to think that it was a problem of stereotypes (which I still do) but now I've gained another layer of understanding. I think that knitters upset people because we lack a demographic, and because you don't understand knitting until you do it.

"Think about it. Imagine trying to finish the sentence "Knitters are...." and see what kind of trouble you can get yourself into. Can't say old, can't say young, can't say women. Can't say we all like wool, can't say we all knit acrylic. Can't say we all enjoy knitting socks, can't say that all of us see the pleasure in an afghan. We don't all knit for charity, we don't all have cats. We didn't all vote for the NDP, we don't all go to church. We don't all have grandchildren, we don't all go to Knit Night, we aren't all hip - or not hip. We don't even all stash yarn or knit in public. We are almost impossible to describe, and the things we have in common aren't really visible. Now try "Knitting is...." and you'll have the same trouble. What are you going to say? Fun? Easy? Hard? Challenging? Meditative? Cheap? Expensive? No matter what you try to say, a thousand exceptions are going to crop up and ruin your point. The truth of all of it is (I think) that the answers are so complicated because they have to do with what we've learned about knitting and how the practice of it has influenced our thinking and behaviour."

Sound familiar? Look at your NP friends and what you all like to stitch and try to sum them and it up and you’ll have the same trouble. The Harlot has an advance copy of her new book at her house (it’s called “Things I Learned From Knitting….Whether I Wanted To or Not” by Stephanie McPhee and I think I’m going to buy this one) and she goes on to explain:

“While I was carrying it around this weekend (Yeah. I know, but it's sort of a big deal to me) I was talking to someone who clearly wanted to be kind to the little author with her silly book, but totally could not get what it was about. Once we had established that there were no patterns and no instructions for knitting, he was clearly at an impasse about what the hell could be in it? "Humour and Philosophy about knitting" I said, and he looked at me exactly like I had said it was full of "the crushed and dried entrails of a wildebeest with my personal diary written in blood". It was, I realized, inexplicable to him. Just like a bunch of knitters partying in a yarn shop, or travelling to a knitting event, taking over a coffee shop or filling a bookstore, it was inexplicable knitter behaviour. Next to the stereotypes, it's probably the biggest thing that knitters face. They can't define us, so they can't understand us, so they ignore us, or stare. Now, this is not a call to arms (or needles). We are never going to get them to understand us. Instead, I have realized that the way that non-knitters find us inexplicable is an invitation. I can't be the only one who, upon realizing that they don't get us and don't care that they don't get us (in fact, they don't think about us at all) suddenly develops an urge to be as absolutely inexplicable as possible. “

If you want to read what the Yarn Harlot said in full, go to the link below and scroll down until you find her 3/24/08 entry.

http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/

Now back to the inexplicable behavior part. The Yarn Harlot finds all this an invitation to have knitters be themselves in as many ways as possible in public. I think when it comes to needlepointers, we are going to use the invitation to reach out, to ask folks if they’d like to try it, if they’d like something stitched just for them, if they just want to sit and watch a bit and talk about making something with your hands.

Try it. You might find issuing invitations to the NP party fun.

Fan's Kimono

Yesterday's photo of Fan showed one row of her kimono stitched but I didn't mention it. I was amused to note no sharp-eyed person noticed and asked about it, but with the Comments system in Yahoo 360 not working well (and I haven't turned Comments on in the Blogspot mirror blog) you might have noticed and not been able to say anything. Before I talk about the kimono's stitch, let me say I forgot to mention one thing yesterday when I talked about stitching right on top of the tiny butterfly antenna in Fan's hand. In one spot I also stitched over the butterfly wing a bit. You can see that in the photos yesterday and today. I plan to put the wing right on top of the background stitch.

Now let's talk about the kimono. I've stitched the left sleeve in the stitch I plan to use, which is called the I stitch. You can see it here on Carole Lake's website. By the way, Carole has lots of cool stitches diagrammed there which aren't available online anywhere else. It's a great resource for which I am very grateful.

http://www.carolelake.com/Stitches/I-Stitch.htm

I work the I stitch in three steps. First I did a long vertical column of the / stitches, then I worked back up on one side adding the cross bar. Finally, I did the other cross bar doing back down on the other side of the original / stitches. I used two plies of my darkest orange Splendor silk. The paint shows a little so you can see the shading without my having to change colors.

I did one column of the first step in the back hem of the kimono on the left and started back up on the left with the cross bars there. Ran out of thread so I didn't finish step 2. Notice that my column on the left back hem doesn't line up with the sleeve. But that's ok. In real life any pattern on the fabric of a kimono sleeve probably doesn't line up with the rear hem fabric. This is realistic.

When I start doing the right sleeve, I'll slant the step one column the other way \ and I'll also make sure that the front of the kimono under the obi belt will all line up from the belt down to the bottom above her shoes. That's also realistic. Make sense?

This blog entry is also on my main blog at

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow