Playing with Colors

Gay Ann Rogers' mystery piece called Mystery in a Corner is stimulating a lot of discussion about color. Visit her blog and scroll through all the thread packets to see a variety of choices for the design,


http://gayannrogers.blogspot.com/2008/06/mystery-in-corner-great-commentary-on.html


then visit Pierette's blog to read through all her color commentary. Remember, start at the bottom of the page and read up.


http://www.lovetostitch99.blogspot.com/


You can read more color commentary on Jeanne's blog, although it isn't as extensive.


http://juststring.blogspot.com/2008/05/more-purple-please.html


Very interesting! Thanks for sharing.



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

Dragon Rock Almost Done

I am adding bullions in various sizes and copper shades around the rock itself. I am also tossing in a few blue bullions. Bullions in metallics are hard because the thread is stiff but I really like how they look, particularly in the Needle Necessities' Kreinik overdyed metallic. I am not using the overdyed Kreinik here, but I have used it many other places to wonderful effect.

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

How to Stitch a Dragon

The photo above shows my progress stitching my dragon rock jewelry piece.

To show you how I got there, here's a scan of my first step. I put my rock on the canvas scrap where I thought it would look ok, and drew around it with a blue quilting pen, then stitched all the way around my design area with tent stitches. This helps me in finishing later and shows me the margins to stop stitching as well as where the rock is. I don't want to put the rock on top of stitches so I'll avoid that round area. I want to nestle the rock down with stitches surrounding it and then decorate the edge with bullions.



Then I had to decide how to stitch a dragon theme around the rock. My first thought was the traditional dragon holding a pearl in one claw design, but when you combine such a small area with my drawing skills (less than a 4 year old's!), I decided that wouldn't work. Too bad, but how about an eye of a dragon? The rock could be the pupil....

Again, I decided I didn't have enough room to adequately convey what I was aiming for. I was going to have to settle for dragon scales. I thought about doing something random in all sizes of oval stitches to mimic dragon scales since Laura Perin's Pacific Tide Pool class piece that shows random sea creatures (look at the June 11 entry in the link below) turned out so well.

http://two-handedstitcher.blogspot.com/

But in the end I choose a trellis pattern (based loosely on Marnie Ritter's Composite Flat Pattern #2 from the March/April 1991 Needlepoint Plus magazine), laid out my grid, stitched the triangle shapes and then started filling in the empty areas with a variety of threads and textures. I used a peach/tan/cream overdyed Impressions #172 Almond, some #4 Kreinik braid in blue #329, my new Silk Lame Braid #SL03 which is cream silk and gold metallic, and of course the shades of Splendor and copper metallic I've already mentioned. I hope it looks a bit like dragon scales. I like how it's turning out. Once I finish laying the top grid of copper metallic (it's finished on the right side of the triangle in the photo but not the left) then I can attach by dragon rock at just the right angle, fold under the edge margins and finish it.



This has taken about 4 hours of stitching to date (we had a cloudburst yesterday so I stitched instead of doing yardwork) and I estimate it will take 6-8 hours from start to finishing. That's not a long period of time, especially for a piece of jewelry.

Odette writes she has a "cherry blossom" rock slab that she's going to play around with. Hopefully she'll be able to send us a photo when she is done!

Before I end, let me update you on the Internet connection problem. The phone company sent a repairman yesterday who managed to get all the static off the line for about two hours. Then we got a downpour and the static is back, worse than ever. I'm on a waiting list for a rush repair in the next 2-3 days since even Verizon agrees that phones should work in the rain. In other words, my posting is still going to be somewhat spotty for the next week or so at least. Sorry.

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

June 2008 Chilly Hollow Newsletter Article

Like all of you, I love doing a little web surfing for inspiration and to enjoy the eye candy. Now that there are a lot of needlepoint blogs to read, the opportunities for ideas to enhance our stitching are even larger than before blogging was popular. One of my very favorite blogs is Laura Perin's Two Handed Stitcher, where she just finished stitching a gerber daisy based on a photograph her sister took. (To see it, look for the May 26 entry in the first link below.) Laura has been bragging about her sister's photographs for a while, so I finally visited her sister's blog and enjoyed the photos a lot. Here's Laura's blog.

http://two-handedstitcher.blogspot.com/

Here is her sister's.

http://www.goingtopieces.blogspot.com/

But the new fun thing I found on Laura's sister's blog is mention of this website--Big Huge Labs--which apparently has a ton of free Photoshop and photo tools. I love this one!

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/colors.php

You upload a digital photo and it analyzes the colors and gives you "swatches" that relate to Photoshop somehow. (Maybe a color correction tool? I don't know much about Photoshop.) You also get the HTML code for the colors. I'm using that code to match the ivory color of my Blog lady photo so I can make the background of my Blogspot blog the same ivory. HTML is the main computer code that makes blogs work. I'm told it's a bit outdated as programming languages go, but it is widely known and versatile so blog programming is usually based on it. I use HTML to make words bold, start a new paragraph, center a photo on the page or to the side, and to tell Blogspot what color I want my background on Blog to be.

I thought you'd have fun looking at the photo tools. The color analysis tool has flaws--I think there might be a limit to the number of colors it displays (I uploaded a photo of Virginia bluebells in bloom and got tons of shades of green for the leaves, almost as many browns for the ground and no blues at all for the bluebells!) and of course the photo quality really determines what the color analysis tool can do, but it was a fun browse. Later on I'll use the tool to pull out colors from designs when I am trying to choose threads. Sometimes I don't notice a color when I'm getting ready to stitch. Some painted canvas designers put little boxes of all the paint colors they used in the margin of the canvas but not all do this.

If you want to see the color tool in action, browse these two blogs. Color-Stripes is a graphic designer's blog but she uses the tool constantly to analyze photographs she likes. The second link is to Orna Willis' website. You probably have seen her geometrics on her website, so take a tour of her thoughts and see the color schemes she explores with this tool.

http://color-stripes.blogspot.com/

http://www.ornadesign.blogspot.com/

Hope you have fun with color through visiting the above.

Jane/Chilly Hollow
blogging at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow and
mirror blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com

I've Got a Rock-Now What?

I've got hours of basketweave ahead of me still on Autumn Leaves, which I know must be as boring for you to watch as it is for me to stitch, so we'll take a little detour into rock slab jewelry land, shall we?

What you see above is the stuff I pulled out of my stash once I found the perfect rock at the local bead store. The threads are all Splendor silk, in the dark copper S850 and the lighter golden/tan of S839, plus the dark teal S1114. I also grabbed some Kreinik metallic in the copper 027 (size #16 medium braid) and a spool of Accentuate metallic in a similar copper 026. I may change my mind later (we are making this up as we go along, you know) but those are the colors I started with. They resemble the colors in my crazy lace agate.

Now, we have to come up with a design. My scrap of canvas looks to be 18 count and it is in the shape of a triangle, about 4 inches long on the short sides and probably 6 inches on the long side. So I have about a 2 inch by 2 inch space to fill with my rock and some pattern.

What to do, what to do? Well, when in doubt you know what I do--I cheat! This time cheating took the form of looking at my rock. I decided it would be easy to copy the shapes on my rock in stithes. I could plop the rock down on the canvas somewhere, either in the middle or off to either side, and surround it with patterns.

Let's look at my rock. The side I bought it for has a pretty agate swirl that has various layers of color, plus a few round or oval dots of various colors. The rock itself is roughly round with a hole drilled through the middle from one end to the other. I'll be able to attach it to the canvas with a thread quite easily. Neva glues hers but I was shopping at a bead shop, the closest thing I have to a rock shop anywhere near me. Then I turned the rock over and here's what I saw--





Doesn't that look like the head of a dragon to you?

I think we have our design motif!


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