Water Stitch

Lizzy, who has very sharp eyes, noticed that I had started stitching the water at the top in yesterday's photo. I don't have a photo today as my old laptop isn't working but you can look at yesterday's picture to see some of the stitching.

I'm using David McCaskill's water stitch from the Stitch of the Month on ANG's website. Here is the link.

http://www.needlepoint.org/StitchOfTheMonth/2003/mar.php

I am having trouble with the stitch as David diagrammed it. The easiest thing for me was to work the stitch in columns from the top down. I did the / slants first, then went back and did the slants in the opposite direction \ using one ply of Splendor blue silk for each slant. You can see both slants in the previous photo. Then I did the third step in an Anchor metallic which is a similar blue working the tent stitch at the end of the / slant first and then did the tent stitches that go at the end of the \ slant. This Anchor thread is very similar to Kreinik's blending filament except it is a bit thicker and stiffer and doesn't separate into two parts like blending filament does. I don't think you can see much of this thread in the photo but in person it has a nice gleam.

I've also started stitching a leaf so I could see how it looks with the fish and water stitching. I'm using two plies of Mandarin floss to tent stitch the olive green part of one leaf. It looks fine although I do have to be very careful that the plies don't twist in the needle. With just two plies, this is very noticable.

I plan to work on the water and maybe finish the leaf tonight. Stay tuned.

Lizzy, let me know if this doesn't answer all your questions.

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

A Long, Sweeping Tail

I wasn't able to finish the long tail of our goldfish last night, but it is 2/3 done and I've stitched the dorsal fin on his back (If you don't read the comments, you didn't hear that the designer Gail Hendrix says the goldfish is male-that's why he is so colorful) and the front fins under his chin.

You can't see how the silk shines in the photo but I must say the packed outline stitch I used looks very good in silks. I used one ply of my Splendor silk (the darkest rose is Bella Silk) in the same colors as the Melissa Shirley Asian girls I just finished.

I started at one end of an area and worked a color at a time, slowly filling out the side and moving towards the middle and then to the other edge. I discovered that it's ok to not completely pack the stitches. You can always go back and fill in a bit here and there where it looks skimpy. I think that's better than putting in too many stitches. I also discovered that the darker colors were often overwhelmed by the lighter colors (How odd is that!?) and I needed to put another stitch or two in of the darkest rose so it wasn't just a tiny line.

I like how this is developing. Wish you could see him in person!

Tonight I'll finish the tail and hopefully start work on the water.

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

Embroidery on Linen UPDATED

There are two pieces of embroidery on linen up for sale at eBay I thought you might enjoy looking at. The person selling the pieces has some nice closeups for your viewing pleasure. They were purchased by her mother from someone with the initials MHH in Michigan years ago. Nice work!

UPDATE: The first piece in the link below (and shown above) sold for $91.66 plus $8 shipping. The second piece sold for the starting bid of $9.99 plus undisclosed shipping costs. That was a real deal! If you are the buyers, congratulations.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320271254663

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320270792612

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

Fish Scales

I've finished the fish scales on Gail's goldfish as you can see in the photo above. It dawned on me that I didn't explain how I worked the stitch or how I choose the color of the single ply of Splendor silk I used for it.

First, I worked Judy's Blocks from the top of each column down. I worked the cashmere stitch and then the four tent stitches in a block and then the cashmere stitch again These stitches are offset slightly so the next row you have to adjust the position of your starting point. You could alwo work the cashmere stitches on the diagonal and then go back and fill in with tent stitches but I found that harder to do so I just did a column at a time. To keep the silk as straight as possible, I let my needle dangle to untwist the thread after each cashmere stitch was finiished.

I worked from the head back, omitting the bulging fish eyes and mouth. Those will be worked in a different stitch later. I started with orange, then switched to rose, then to coral, then dark orange, then light orange, then a touch of pale yellow and finally pale pink. I choose these colors by looking at the unstitched canvas, and decided which color was most prominent in the fish's body. I laid that color out above the fish then moved to the next area and choose the most prominent color there, etc. Once I was happy with how the skeins of thread seemed to flow, those are the colors I went with. Most areas have 3-5 colors in them but I choose the color that seemed most prominent except at the head where I ignored the dark brown and choose the rose instead.

I finished either the tent stitch block or the cashmere block before I changed color, even if the paint seemed to switch abruptly. I thought it more important to get the stitch right than the color, and I think it worked out well.

Next, the fins and tail.

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

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