Summertime is Time for Learning NP

School's out and a lot of parents are trying to entertain their kids this summer with things that are not wildly expensive but fun. How about teaching someone young to needlepoint?

You can rummage in your stash and come up with a whole range of colors in a variety of thread textures, then sketch a simple design from a coloring book onto a small piece of canvas and let them go to town. That's pretty much what Needleartnut did with a cupcake canvas she is stitching as a present for a bride who is a baker and who loves cupcakes. Didn't it turn out great? And it wouldn't be too hard for a beginner. If you want to see this develop as it was stitched, click on Cupcake in the right hand column list of keywords.
http://needleartnut.blogspot.com/2009/06/final-touch.html

Another way to go would be with a simple painted canvas. How about Fish Your Stash from Finger Step Designs? The canvas comes with a booklet full of ideas and photos of various examples to unlock your creativity as you stitch this with a young friend.
http://store.apneedlearts.com/fish8.html

Whatever route you take, don't forget to pass our love of hand work along to someone this summer!

Jane/Chilly Hollow
Archived Yahoo 360 postings at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chillyhollow

Your Canvas Is In the Mail

What with pet guardian angels arriving from the other folks stitching them for the ANG Auction, Judie's surprise little hospitality stocking she sent me, and the canvas you see on the left arriving in my mailbox, well, it is pretty exciting to see the mail lady pull up the driveway in Chilly Hollow!

This is an Amanda Lawford design, the new Nutcracker Santa for 2009 which arrived about two weeks ago. Each year Amanda comes up with a new Santa theme for that year. There are a lot of them, one for every taste, on her website. Just click on the link below and browse.
http://www.amandalawford.com/products/santas1.html

They come in several heights (30", 15" and 9" tall). My Nutcracker Santa is the 15 inch one and is on 18 count canvas. He is really lovely! Here's another photo from the Needle Works blog. (If you get the annoying authentication window, just click Cancel to make it go away.)
http://theneedleworks.typepad.com/the_needle_works/2009/01/cant-sleep-1.html

I saw one of the larger sizes stitched at the ANG Seminar Exhibit in Baltimore in 2007. It won a ribbon, too! They work up beautifully, as you will see if you look about halfway down the page for Nancy Demko's Maroon Santa with Deer.
http://www.needlepoint.org/WhatIs/2007/index.php

I'd never seen an unpainted Amanda Lawford canvas in person before. I can report these are beautifully stitch painted in beautiful colors. If you have the time to tackle a large Christmas project, there just might be a Santa for you in her line.

If you don't, I'm happy to report that her son Derek is starting his own line of small, simple and affordable canvases. I got his e-newsletter with photos of his first designs and if you email me at chilly hollowat hot maildotcom I will forward it on to you to see.

By the way, I weighed down the canvas with a heavy coaster to take the photo but didn't cut that out of the picture so that you could see the canvas number and Amanda's lovely stylized signature. The coaster is what you see on the bottom. Sorry!

Jane/Chilly Hollow
Archived Yahoo 360 postings at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chillyhollow

More New Things

Some new items are showing up in the shops already. Amy Bunger's on-line store has started posting photos of new floral canvases here. The newest things are at the top of the page.
http://www.amybunger.com/flowers_fruits_vegs.html

Janet Perry clued me into a new strong magnet that is unusual in that it has a metal heart design on top. If you ever wished those decorative magnets were stronger or that the top didn't block the magnetic forces, this might be the set for you. A photo is on the left side of this article.
http://store.puffinco.com/servlet/-strse-33/Puffin-and-Company-Needle/Detail

Finally, Old World Designs has started to post photographs of their new club, The Twelve Days of California. Instead of a Christmas theme, the round ornaments all showcase California icons. Three designs are on their website now. You'll have to bookmark the site and check later to see them all.
http://www.oldworlddesigns.com/california.html

They also have a neat purse kit based on a Zecca canvas (a little more than halfway down this page) that is a sort of Country Style Goes Crazy. It looks like a really fun thing to stitch.
http://www.oldworlddesigns.com/classprojects.html

Jane/Chilly Hollow
Archived Yahoo 360 postings at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chillyhollow

Rearranging the Furniture

I'm rearranging the furniture here at Blog this morning. I get bored with the same old look and when you open a surprise package you get in the mail and find the little Kathy Schenkel stocking shown on the right, well, it's time for a new header to welcome visitors to The Chilly Hollow Needlepoint Adventure!

This darling treat, customized for me, was a present from Judie Solomon of Thistle Needleworks in Connecticut. You may remember that I interviewed Judie here a few weeks back. Judie graciously sent me photos of some of her stitching, including little KS Designs mini stockings she'd stitched for her kids. I jokingly asked to be adopted and Judie took me up on it!

There are many more little KS Designs mini stocks that come with felt animals and other things like my hospitality pineapple. You can see some of them on Judie's needlepoint site--
http://store.apneedlearts.com/miwdo.html

Thank you again, Judie. It was a special treat and it is beautifully stitched. Wish you guys could see the tiny details. I stitch a lot for other folks but rarely receive a needlepoint piece made just for me. I appreciate it!

And many thanks to Kathy Schenkel for allowing me to use her hospitality stocking as a header to welcome folks to Blog.

Jane/Chilly Hollow
Archived Yahoo 360 postings at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chillyhollow

The Bee from SharonG

I've had this fabulous little canvas from SharonG in my stash for a while. There are two versions of it. The larger piece has the bee hovering over a rose, I think, but I can't find it online. My piece is of the little bee by itself and I just love it! This canvas is 18 count and is about 5 inches square. The bee itself is maybe 2 inches high and a little less wide.

I always knew how I was going to stitch this--I planned to add a silk ribbon embroidery (SRE) flower under the bee and frame it in a shadow box to make room for a dimensional flower yet protect the piece with glass. I live along a dirt road and don't have air conditioning so there is constant dust coming into the house through open windows. Therefore, I always put glass over framed pieces to protect them. I've kept my eyes open for the perfect shadow box frame and finally found a white one with a cream mat. The mat opening was 4 inches square, perfect for this canvas.



However, to squeeze in a SRE flower was going to take some doing! I decided I needed to put the mat over the canvas in several positions and decide exactly what area I would need to stitch before I did anything else. What you see on the right is the position I decided on. I thought it would give me enough room to add a flower in the lower left hand corner to make it seem as if the bee was coming in for a landing on the flower center. I carefully marked the area I would need to fill with background.


I already knew how I planned to stitch the little jewel of a bee (metallics, mostly tent stitches) but the background was a puzzle. SharonG suggested I use something that indicated it was raining. I thought about that for a while as I browsed my stitch books. As usual, I settled on a stitch from one of Brenda Hart's books-Diagonal Brick (from her Favorite Stitches, page 49). This stitch resembles two parallel slanted lines // and is done horizontally. Below you see the background underway and the bee's body stitched (tent stitches) using black and two shades of gold Kreinik with some overdyed Kreink in the grayish-white area.

To do Diagonal Brick you stitch a pair of long slanted stitches over four thread intersections, then skip over an area that could hold two more stitches, then do another pair of stitches, repeat for the entire row. The second row is the same as the first except that you put your pair of slanted stitches in the empty areas of the first row, skipping down two thread intersections to start the new pair of Diagonal Brick over the third intersection. Repeat endlessly. You will notice I used a pretty variegated blue silk floss (two plies, so I was carefully laying the silk with my laying tool the whole background) from Thread Gatherer called Delphinium. To me it looks just like blue sky with a little white mist of clouds here and there. Doesn't look like rain, does it?

Not to worry! I had A Plan to add rain later. Once the background was finished, I carefully over-stitched a few pairs of Diagonal Brick with a strand of light blue Accentuate #032. Since I scattered the Accentuate at random over the background, there is a little "wet" sparkle here and there as if it was just starting to sprinkle. You probably can't see the metallic thread on the piece but in person it is a really great effect. Thanks for the idea, SharonG!

The wings of the bee were beautifully painted with copper and black but some areas were unpainted to show white. I stitched the wings in layers. The first layer was more Accentuate (clear #300) in long stitches laid on the diagonal from one wing edge to the other. This adds sparkle but allows the paint colors to show. Layer #2 was stitching the veins, either in black or copper Kreinik using #4 braid in stem stitches). I used a small, sharp needle which went right though the first layer of Accentuate. Layer #3 outlined the wings with more black Kreinik in more stem stitches. The veins and outlines stand out while the Accentuate shows off the lovely painted detail through a slight film of sparkle. Not all the black veins are top-stitched, by the way. The smallest ones I left alone to make them less prominent. You can still see the lines through the clear Accentuate.


This photo shows the bee wings stitched and the background done. I stitched right over the painted antenna and wings with my background stitches, then looking at the copy of the canvas I made before I started, I stem-stitched the antenna (more black Kreinik #4 braid) back on top of the Diagonal Brick stitches. In the photo above the antenna are done but the legs haven't been added back in yet.

The next step once the background and bee were stitched was to add the flower. I consulted Helen Ericksson's Ribbon Renaissance: Artistry in Silk, which has the most beautiful silk ribbon flowers you'd ever want to see. I decided on her peony rose, and started to search for peony photos to help me plan where the flower petals should go.
http://www.heleneriksson.com/

My favorite place to look for inspiration photos online is Flickr. Head over to their main page and search the public photos and you'll find lots of ideas, shapes and sizes of flowers.
http://www.flickr.com/




Search on your favorite flower and you'll see what I mean. Look for a photo that shows you the shape you need, then pick out another that shows the stem and leaves of your flower species well and a third that shows how the center where the pistils are well. Print them out, then cut out the shape and see how it looks on top of your stitched piece. This is what I came up with.





Now it's time to test ribbon. I had 9mm, 7mm and 4mm ribbon in various shades of pink and variated pink in my stash and decided I would mix colors and types to achieve a realistic flower.


I knew most of my peony would be done in Japanese ribbon stitch (called ribbon stitch in Helen's book) so I practiced some stitches in various brands of silk ribbon so see how they looked before I started actually stitching my flower. This is what I came up with. The pale pink ribbon is YLI's Spark Organdy ribbon in pink 002. This ribbon is 9mm wide. The variagated pink ribbon is River Silk's V No. 106 (the V stands for variagated). This ribbon is smaller, only 4 mm wide. I ended up using it and the solid medium pink River Silk S19 as well as a hand dyed 7mm ribbon called Petals in Rainbow Sherbet (pinks with a touch of peach) from Sweet Child of Mine.



Following Helen's instructions, I worked the flower in layers, back to front, stitching some petals on top of back petals with a sharp crewel needle and leaving room in the center for the pistils of the flower center. I had some frosted yellow long bugle beads from Blue Moon Beads that I added for the center as the last step in stitching this piece. One long thread of silk perle Grandeur #G848 in wrapped stem stitch added the stem. I decided I didn't have enough room to do a leaf. I think that I should have used wider ribbons than I had for the flower to make it look like a peony (it is more like a chrysanthemum) but this was an experiment. Scale is very important in stitching realistic pieces and my flower is really too small for the bee but this was a learning experience. And it certainly is charming.


Here is SharonG's bee finished, then framed in its little shadow box.


This tiny design was a very fast stitch as SRE and the Diagaonal Brick are fast to do. Most of my designs are larger and I break down how they were stitched into multiple blog entries, but since this was small I decided to experiment and just describe everything in one long essay. I hope you enjoyed watching this as much as I enjoyed stitching it!

Anyone who wants to pick up this canvas and try stitching a flower of their own? It's available here and many other shops, too.
http://www.needlenookoflajolla.com/designers/sharon/index.html

UPDATE: If you are at all hesitant about trying silk ribbon embroidery on your needlepoint, check out what Judy Harper is doing with one of her birthday crazy quilt pattern hearts. Isn't that pretty/!
http://fairy-crafts.blogspot.com/2009/06/august-cq-sword-lily-in-silk-ribbon.html

Jane/Chilly Hollow
Archived Yahoo 360 postings at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chillyhollow