Autumn Leaves Plan of Attack

When planning how to stitch a piece entirely in tent stitches, usually you are told to start in either one corner or the middle. Personally, I think where you start depends on the actual design and the size of the piece and whether you are using scroll frames. Some patterns have big areas in the center; in that case I might stitch those first. Other designs, especially if you are doing the piece all in basketweave, work up well if you start in a corner and work diagonally to the opposite corner. If you use a scroll frame, you will probably also work this way since you need to stitch down a ways from the top, stop and roll the stitched area around the scroll frame at the top and unroll the unstitched canvas at the bottom to expose more area to work.

For Autumn Leaves we are going to try both ways of stitching. I’ll do the small brown leaf in the center and also start in one corner. We’ll compare the two plans of attack this way. But before we start, we need to talk about the tent stitches we can choose from.

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

Kreinik's 24 Ways UPDATED

Kreinik's website has just posted a new article in PDF form--24 Ways to Embellish a Needlepoint Canvas, by Suzanne Howren and Beth Robertson.

http://www.kreinik.com/

It promotes Kreinik's threads, of course, but that doesn't mean there aren't some great ideas there.

Thanks!

UPDATE: If you are having trouble finding the article, it's at the bottom right of the link. The title of the home page link is 24 Ways to Use Braid. Sorry for the confusion. I failed to notice that the link had a slightly different title than the article.

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

Autumn Leaves Colors and Threads

The Lani Autumn Leaves canvas I’m going to start stitching shortly contains nine colors and threads (above). Here’s the list of colors with what I bought to use for these colors.

bright red (Vineyard Silks Classics #C-006 Tomato)
medium and dark red-orange (Panache PN31 and PN30)
peach (Panache PN07)
medium and light lavender (Impressions 2055 and 2056)
dark brown (Mandarin Floss M886)
golden tan (Mandarin Floss M842)
ivory (Impressions 1146 or possibly Silk Lame Braid SL03)

I am considering adding a tenth color as a border--the very pretty peach and cream Impressions 172 Almond. There is also a possibility of an eleventh color-black. The red leaves’ veins and outline seems to be darker than the tan leaves’ dark brown. I haven’t decided whether I’ll play up this difference by using black silk Splender on the red or not.

Ten colors aren’t really that many (some Ehrman Tapestry and Elizabeth Bradley kits have 27 colors) but switching between even ten colors as you tent stitch can be daunting. Stay tuned and I’ll give you my best tips for starting and stopping so many colors. I plan to talk about each thread brand I use as I use it so folks who haven’t seen it can learn more about that thread and its properties. That’s why I included Panache, Vineyard Silks, Mandarin Floss and Silk Lame Braid. All are new threads in the last year or two, except for Mandarin Floss which I think has been out for three years.

By the way, some of the photos of the Autumn Leaves canvas make the brown leaves look green, but they are not. You can’t trust either cameras or computer monitors to get colors right.

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

Autumn Leaves Starting Line Thoughts: Framing Up

When I taught myself to needlepoint most people held their stitching in their hand without a frame or stretcher bars. Everyone wet and then blocked their finished needlepoint projects by pinning them to blocking boards. Some folks painted the back side of their canvas with rabbit glue to hold the shape after blocking. I knew some people used stretcher bars when they stitched, but I didn’t understand why--until I stitched my leopard spots pillow. It was fairly good sized, probably 13-14 inches square, stitched with Paternayan yarn in tent stitches (I used the continental version of tent stitch, which is notorious for pulling a canvas out of true) on penelope canvas. When I finished stitching it, it looked really nice except that the square was now a parallelogram. I blocked it three separate times, and as soon as the canvas was dry and off the blocking board, it reverted to the parallelogram shape, at least a little. I finally gave up on making the leopard canvas square and started putting my canvases on stretcher bars.

Stretcher bars do take some getting used to because holding a frame while you stitch is awkward, but many folks now also use a floor or table frame that takes over the job of holding the stretcher bars in position while you stitch with both hands. Some brands are heavier than others, so if you find stretcher bars too weighty, see if you can find the lighter weight, slimmer ones.

If you look at the photo of Autumn Leaves above you’ll see it’s stapled to fairly wide stretcher bars. I like the slim ones but my pair was in use already so I picked up the only brand available to me locally, the wide and heavy ones. I will probably stitch most of this piece in hand instead of putting this in my K’s metal floor frame. I save that for larger pieces. The piece itself is only 3 by 6 inches but the margins are very wide so it is on 8x10 stretcher bars.

You’ll also see that I turned the edge of the canvas over. I couldn’t get the next larger size of stretcher bars so I made do with what I could buy. Those of you in areas with many needlepoint shops will be able to buy just the sizes you need but many of us don’t have that luxury. It doesn’t make any difference to the stitching that I can see. I could have cut off the extra canvas to match to the size of my stretcher bars but since this is a teaching piece I thought I’d demonstrate various ways of handling the problem of a canvas slightly larger than the stretcher bars.

Many stitchers I know use thumbtacks to attach their canvas to the frame but since I can’t buy the big ones here, I use my staple gun. For me it works just as well, although one day I might treat myself to several boxes of the nice large thumbtacks and the tool to put them in and remove them. You can see the Corjac Thumbtack Kit here. Something very similar is called the EZ Tack It kit. I have seen the Corjac at Needlewoman East and it is very well made, so when I buy, that will be what I choose.

http://www.joann.com/joann/catalog.jsp?CATID=cat2887&PRODID=prd17161&AID=10273743&PID=2493916&_requestid=463078

or Tiny URL

http://tinyurl.com/6koqj9

Next time we’ll talk about the threads I choose for Autumn Leaves and after that where I plan to start stitching and why.

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

Autumn Leaves Starting Line Thoughts: The Paint Job

Before starting to stitch on Autumn Leaves, I want to talk a bit about painted canvas quality. Probably everyone here knows that the term “painted canvas” covers a wide area--from canvases that were computer printed or silk screened to hand painted or stitch-painted designs. So naturally the precision of the paint job depends on how a canvas was created. It is difficult for silk screened or computer printed canvases to go through the machinery perfectly straight, and NP canvas count isn’t always exactly so many threads per inch anyway. There is variation in the canvas, so the printed image put on it by machine isn’t going to be totally straight. Artists who don’t needlepoint themselves may do beautiful work but stitchers have problems trying to stitch a thin-lipped mouth, stitching something perfectly round, etc. Some areas may not be translatable into the NP grid. So a canvas painted by a real person is no guarantee that you won’t occasionally not know exactly what to do. “Stitch painted” canvases are created to avoid this problem. Each thread intersection is supposed to be totally covered in one color.

This may or may not matter to you, depending on your personality. Some folks are driven nuts by not knowing exactly where a line or color falls on a canvas. Some canvases’ hand painted lines are thicker or thinner according to how the brush was held, so some of the paint will not fall on a canvas intersection. It will be between a thread. How do you stitch that? How do you know where to put a red stitch when the red paint falls between two threads? If you look at the veins in the leaves above and also the edges, you’ll see that it isn’t always clear where to put the stitch for that dark line.

Actually, this is a really easy problem to handle. Give it your best guess, put in a stitch, put the canvas down and step back and look. Look ok? Then it is. Don’t like it? Pull it out and put that stitch in another location and check again.

I know some folks find this very annoying and simply don’t want to deal with a canvas that has an imprecise paint job. If you are one of these folks, ask your shop to help you discover which designers turn out stitch painted-canvases. If you limit your purchases to those, you will never have a problem. Everyone else should look very carefully at any painted canvas in good light before taking it home with you. Know the problems of that canvas first, then decide if it is the right design to spend your precious free time on.

However, this is advice easier to say than to follow. Everyone here has lost their heart to a canvas that wasn’t precisely painted. All I can tell you is to remember that needlepoint designs are not precise copies of images--they are artistic representations. You will not usually have a finished piece as detailed as a photograph. The eye of the viewer will put two and two together unconsciously and understand the image without thinking about it. Choose the thread intersection that looks best, try it, rip it out and redo if you don’t like the look, then keep stitching. Remember that you are holding your current project in your lap probably only a foot from your eyes. Once a project is framed or made up into a pillow, bystanders won’t see it up close like you do. You are going to notice problems more than regular passersby will.

We’ll talk more about deciding what color goes where as Autumn Leaves is stitched. The design falls on thread intersections fairly well as you can see in the close-up of the small red and tan leaves above, but there are curved veins where I’ll have to make a decision. And there are lines that are both thick and thin so I will have to decide whether to add stitches in that color to make a thicker line or not. When we get to a problem area, I’ll demonstrate how I proceed. Cleta, thanks for pointing out that this is something I needed to talk about!

P.S. Sorry it took so long for me to post the photo today. My home Internet connection kept cutting out on me and I was really REALLY busy at work today!

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