Oops!

Last night I picked up the goldfish to do a little tent stitching on his lilypads. Saturday I visited the counted thread place not that far from my house because they were having a sale. I needed a dark medium green for the lily pads and although they didn't have the right green in Splendor or Mandarin Floss, I was able to pick up a card of Rainbow Gallery's Grandeur. Grandeur is a silk perle and because both it and Splendor are from Rainbow Gallery, the colors are identical. You can sometimes get a silk floss and a silk perle in the same color for unusual and special effects on a design. I am not doing this here but you can. Just saying....

Anyway, I pulled out my green Grandeur, took three tent stitches and stopped. Remember how I was tent stitching this leaf with two plies of Mandarin floss in the olive green? The Grandeur was too fat! It made my tent stitches in dark green much higher and fatter than the olive green ones in Mandarin floss. Oops!

Today I'll hit up the crafts emporium with my card of Grandeur (which is about the size of a number 8 perle cotton) and see if I can find a skein of DMC in the right shade. If I had a brain in my head, I would have bought a card of Rainbow Gallery's Elegance, which is the size of number 12 perle and much thinner, and tried to match the tent stitches in Mandarin Floss to that.

But I am an idiot. Oh, well, live and learn!

By the way, I have a card of medium blue Grandeur that's also too fat for the water. Double idiot. LOL

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

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