Squiggee's Goldfish Ornament

Now that the Halloween trick-or-treaters stocking is done, I have picked up the other Squiggee design in my stash, the lovely pink fish you see above. I think this must be a goldfish, one of the ones that charmed me in the fishtanks at the pet store when I was a child. They are all bulging eyes and beautiful colors, with a long graceful tail and a fat wiggle to their upper bodies. Squiggee's is pink, my favorite color, and was taken from a Gail Hendrix design of a frog weight that had lots of underwater motifs on it. I asked Gail if she would turn the goldfish into an ornament for me and she did.

Most Squiggee painted canvases are lighthearted but this taps into Gail's more classic design sense. It is on 18 count canvas and is approximately 4 inches in diameter. When I asked her to paint this for me, I explicitly said it should not be an exclusive for me, but a design that anyone can buy from her Squiggee website, so you can have your own goldfish for your home if you so desire. Here's Squiggee's website so you can have a fun browse.

http://www.squiggeedesigns.com/

It is beautifully stitched-painted and must have taken hours to do. If you look closely at the fish scales, you'll see careful lines of color that range from a very dark brown through roses and corals and oranges to yellow and shades of pale pink that become almost white. The goldfish swims among lily pads in medium blue waters. When I started pulling colors, I discovered that I can use all the silks form the two little Asian girls in this design. The colors are almost identical. I did have to find earthy greens (mostly Mandarin silks) and a pretty blue in Rainbow Gallery's Grandeur (silk perle size #5).

My thought in starting to stitch Gail's goldfish was to use stitches that don't fully cover so that the piece can be framed over a mirror to give an underwater wet gleam to the fish. After all, most of my silks I pulled are pliable so I can use just one of them easily.

This design has a two-part background (the lilypads and the blue water) and a four-part foreground (the goldfish, with prominent eyes and mouth, long flowing tail, upright dorsal fins and sideways front fins, and finally the body). I decided to start with the goldfish's body and find a stitch for the scales first. Look carefully at the body of the fish. Isn't everything sort of upright and rectangular? There are many color changes (another reason to use light coverage stitches--you don't have to change threads often since the color will show under your skimpy thread) so I decided it would not be easy to do scale-shaped stitches here. I thought and browsed my stitch books and thought some more. Nothing seemed to be the right shape or suitable for a light coverage.

Then I visited Judy Harper's blog....

http://fairy-crafts.blogspot.com/2008/07/cq-with-silk-ribbon-and-beads.html

Inspiration strikes at the oddest times! Look at her latest crazy quilt heart, the yellow, coral and green one with the white daisies. Now look at the yellow rectangular stitch at the bottom point. Doesn't that sort of look like the scales on Gail's goldfish to you? I don't know what this stitch is called (can't find it in any of my stitch books) so let's call it Judy's Blocks.

Here is what I've stitched so far on the goldfish's scales, using one ply of silk Splendor in rose, coral and now orange as I work my way toward the fish's tail doing Judy's Blocks. I hope to finish the entire body by the end of the holiday weekend. Pretty soon I'll switch to one ply of yellow and then a pale pink....

This is so much fun!

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

Introducing the Stitching Whimsies

I have a group of guest bloggers to introduce to you today--the Stitching Whimsies. See the Melissa Shirley canvas above? It's called The Stitching Club and the Whimsies are all stitching this canvas. But here's Gini to explain how they got started and what they are doing.

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"Several stitchers who live in the Antelope Valley portion of Southern California decided to go to Queen Anne Stitches in Santa Clarita, CA, our "local" shop some 35 miles away, to spend the day stitching there. That was several months ago. Over time, the group grew sort of like Topsey, as additional people who stopped in the shop while we were there began coming back to stitch with us. We arrive every Thursday when the shop opens at 11. Then we stitch and chat for a while, break for lunch at one of the several nearby places, then stitch again until around 4. We don't always get a lot of stitching done, but we do have fun.

An aside about Heidi Bontempo (aka the Queen) and her shop… She's been the sole owner for two years, having bought out her partner (aka the Queen Mum). Heidi listens to what her customers want, continues to add new thread lines, carries a variety of canvas sizes, artists, and styles, has trunk shows every other month, and will soon have an online presence. She and Sherry Bray are both fun to be around, and the shop has a wonderfully warm, friendly vibe.

One day, we passed around the Needlepoint Now magazine with the article about Melissa Shirley. [Note: This is the March 2008 issue.] Someone suggested we do "The Stitching Club" together, in what Heidi and Sherry call a "who ha" group, essentially a self-directed class. It means we discuss the canvas, share ideas about stitches and threads for particular areas, and then decide what to do on our own canvas. We spend time passing our canvases around for comments,critiques, and encouragement. The canvas we are stitching is shown above. You can see others in this series here:

http://www.melissashirleydesigns.com//gallery/?cat=74

Heidi dubbed us the Whimsies to distinguish us in her own mind from her other groups, even though some of us have multiple memberships! Six of us are working on The Stitching Club -- Sharon, Gini, Kathy, Jackie, Lori and Nancy. And like our group, it's now known as The Stitching Whimsies. Some of us are far more interested in the process of stitching than in finishing any particular project. Some stitch daily, others less often. Most of us have a myriad of other projects at some stage of completion. And we all like to learn as much as we can from teachers and other stitchers. A core group of 6 or 7 attends regularly and others attend frequently. Heidi happened to show us a new canvas, Associated Talents' Funky Forest. Nancy was talking about ordering it for herself, when Lori piped up and suggested we do it as our next group project. Over a dozen people have ordered that one.

http://www.atneedlepoint.com/CanvasDetails.asp?CanvasNumber=M-164&Example=

signed, Gini

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I hope to have a Whimsy or two drop by about every other Sunday to update you on the progress on their canvases. It's easy to think that there is only one "right" way to stitch a painted canvas. When you see what each Whimsy does with the same canvas and how they all look good, the real charm of painted canvases and how they customize themselves to their stitcher's personality and tastes will be revealed!

Many thanks to the Whimsies for allowing themselves to be showcased here. And by the way, Queen Anne Stitches doesn't have a website or I'd be able to show you the natural habitat of Stitching Whimsies.

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

Halloween Trick or Treaters Done

The stitching on the little Halloween stocking is done. The buttons were the last bit I needed to add before starting to hunt for the right fabric for the back side. Buttons are attached in many different ways, depending on how they were made. You've all seen buttons on men's dress shirts with the two (or four) little holes that you stitch through to attach them. The buttons that Squiggee included with the canvas are not like those. Working left to right, the cat's head button is flat and thick with a hole drilled through the middle. It was easy to attach with a doubled thread in one side and out the other. The pink skull bead has a shank. I stitched it from the back four times, each stitch slanting in a different / \ _ | direction to try and hold it steady. But this bead will tilt here and there since I did not make a hole in the canvas and push the shank through to the back side. The last bead is the brass moon face which has a loop at the top like a charm. It was easy to attach but it will sway from side to side slightly.

Hope you enjoy the canvas. Many thanks to Squiggee herself for designing something so quick and fun.

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

Fright Wig Finished, Claw Added

Here's a photo of the Trick or Treaters stocking from Squiggee with the fright wig all done and combed, and the claw hand added to the middle figure. The "hand" is just beading wire twisted to resemble a bony skeleton hand. One end was poked through the canvas and it was tied down on the back, then I used two small stitches to secure the fingers on the front. It took me a lot longer to explain how the wig and claw were done than to actually add them to the stocking!

In this photo I've added a row of orange beads to the top of the stocking. Squiggee herself showed the beads in a row along the bottom of the stocking top but due to the finishing I plan, I want them at the top.

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

The Fright Wig

The photo on the left shows the fright wig underway. I happened to have two brands of fuzzy threads in my stash I thought might be perfect for the wig of the right hand trick or treater. One used to be called Viola when it was distributed by SharonG but I believe the new name is VaVoom. It's a soft hair-like thread that is very thin and delicate. In the photo below it is the purple thread in the plastic bag and in the stitched samples. It is distributed by dede Odgen now. The other is less soft and more plastic. It used to be called Charleston when the defunct Needle Necessities sold it. Now it is called The Legacy Collection and comes from ThreadWorX. It's the skein of green you see in the photo below.

Here's a link to information about VaVoom.

http://www.needleartworks.com/dsgnr/deo/deo9.htm

And here is one for The Legacy Collection. My skein of green is color #606 Kelly Green.
http://www.threadworx.com/product.php?catid=5&catName=The%20Legacy%20Collection

Even though the black VaVoom is soft like cashmere and looks like long hair and the green looks like a plastic feather boa, they are stitched the same way--in long stitches. The stitched sample you see uses dark purple VaVoom and fancy stitches to show what these threads can do. The stitching is by my dear friend Penny Evans who test drove Viola for me 4-5 years back. Thanks, Penny!

I decided to use the ThreadWorX green instead of the Viola purple since I thought the green would stand out against the purple background of the stocking and the purple robe next to it better. This thread comes in precut yard lengths, so I pulled one out carefully from the skein and cut it in half to have an easy-to-use 18 inch length. Then I used a number 18 needle so that there was plenty of room in the eye for the thread. My canvas is 14 count, by the way, so even the holes are large enough for this thread.

If you look at the top photo again, you'll see that I first stitched three straight lines spaced across the roughly fan shape of the wig. This divides the area into 4 pie-shaped wedges. Then I stitched straight stitches across one wedge at a time, working from left to right. You can work from right to left--this doesn't matter--but I think it helps to distribute the thread evenly to work a section at a time. You can work one half if you want, but I preferred to divide the wig into four areas.

The little plastic hairs that stick out of the central core (look at the green thread in the needle on the left side of the top photo) get mashed down in stitching. One you have totally finished the area in this thread, take your needle and gently stroke it a few times in the opposite direction you want the hairs to point. Then stroke it many times (gently!) in the direction the hairs should point. This gentle petting motion will pull the hairs out from under the long stitches and make it fuzzy.

I'll need to pet the hairs again occasionally as I add other attachments and do the finishing. They do get matted down or point the wrong way after handling. But you'll get the fright wig effect very quickly and easily using either of these threads.

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