Robin (And Amy Bunger) Help With the Dog's Ear

Wednesday when I posted the photo on the left to Blog, I got a nice note from Robin King, who is Amy Bunger's webmaster and who also teaches at Amy's shop. Robin let me know that she had just uploaded a photo of Amy's latest Home Study canvas to the Amy Bunger website and she thought one of the techniques Amy used on the Nativity shepherd piece would work well for the ear of the Cape Cod dog I'm stitching. Here's the link to the photo Robin told me about--

http://www.amybunger.com/albums/album_image/6366238/5301486.htm

Look at the lamb the shepherd is holding. Robin sent me this close up later in the day of the little lamb's ears. Amy did them in needle weaving. Robin thought perhaps I might want to consider needle weaving the ear on my dog. So last night I took out some of my Burmilana and doodled various ears on the edges of my canvas. I tried detached buttonhole instead of needle weaving first. This makes it look easy but I think I need a framework at least on the sides.
http://www.brazilian-dimensional-embroidery.org/stitch_instructions.htm

Like this.
http://www.stitchopedia.com/ButtonholeStitchDetached.html

These two blogs talk about the pitfalls you run into doing detatched buttonhole. I decided that my Burmilana is just too thin to do detached buttonhole successfully. I can barely see the previous row's buttonhole to stitch through it for the next row!
http://juststring.blogspot.com/2008/11/stitch-study-1-detached-buttonhole.html

http://jowynn.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/the-knotted-detached-buttonhole-stitch/

So I looked up needleweaving in Jo I. Christensen's Needlepoint Book. It's on page 367 of the 1999 version if you own this wonderful reference book. Basically you put in two parallel lines as a foundation, then do a herringbone stitch over them, weaving back and forth.

It makes one nice raised ridge, but this is not the version of needleweaving that Amy did on on the little sheep. Robin, with Amy's permission, kindly sent me the diagram of her way of doing this stitch above. Click on the photo to see a larger version. I've been testing needleweaving in the margins of my canvas to see how it looks with my Burmilana and how many strands I should use if I put it on top of the already stitched dog's ear. Hopefully by tomorrow I will have come to some conclusions about the two versions of needleweaving (Jo Christensen's and Amy Bunger's) as they apply to my canvas and threads. Testing is essential at this stage because every stitch, no matter how wonderful, won't work with every design and thread.

Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow
Blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com
Archived Yahoo 360 postings at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chillyhollow

Listening to Barbara Bergsten UPDATED

Rcently I've been really enjoying reading Barbara Bergsten's blog. Barbara designs painted canvases and blogs about her newest pieces and how she is stitching them.
http://createneedlepoint.typepad.com/create_needlepoint/

Barbara's summer intern is busily painting and stitching her first NP design, The Fashionable Lady. It is a delightful elegant woman in black and hopefully a canvas that Barbara will offer one day. UPDATE: You can already order Erin's 1930s woman via Barbara Bergsten Designs. Contact information is here.
http://www.barbarabergstendesigns.com/contact_us.htm

And Erin talks more about her experience learning to design and paint a NP canvas (with contact information) here.
http://createneedlepoint.typepad.com/create_needlepoint/2009/07/more-news-from-erin.html

Barbara herself is stitching a poppy pillow that uses what she calls "sister stitches" for the various flowers. Sister stitches are stitches which are very similar and which can also be used in mirror images of themselves. Because they have a lot in common, you can use a large number of stitches to keep from getting bored that don't look like a mess because of their family resemblance. This is an important technique and one that I use when I can. Barbara shows it off very well on her blog.

After you finish browsing, bookmark this site. Not only does Barbara have fun things to see, she is creating two color stitch diagrams of a huge variety of stitches which will liven up your stitching. To see the current diagrammed stitches, look in the left hand column for "bbd Stitch Diagrams." Click there and enjoy!

Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow
Blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com
Archived Yahoo 360 postings at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chillyhollow

Dog's Head in Knotted Stitch

The head of the largest dog on the Cape Cod Dogs canvas is coming along. I've ended up starting the stitch at the collar by turning the canvas upside down and working from the top of the collar down to the top of the dog's head. If you look carefully at the 3-4 stitches that are above the dip in the collar, you can see I started the stitches there lower than the ones above the straight line of the collar. I thought that would look better than having large compensation stitches right above the collar where they would be very noticeable and the difference in the line does look like a turned neck. So I lucked out there.

Knotted stitch is very easy to switch colors with. I could have (but did not) do the long stitch in one color and the top tie-down stitch in another to further blend colors. I'll leave the black eye and pink mouth unstitched and do those later. I hope to finish the head tonight and then start on the long back of this dog.

Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow
Blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com
Archived Yahoo 360 postings at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chillyhollow

Dog Fur (Or, Jane Climbs Out of a Rut)

As you probably noticed yesterday when examining my floor boards and bar, I've started stitching the largest of two labs on Cape Cod Dogs. I'm using two strands of Burmilana, which is a wool/acrylic mix that comes in a thin strand. Here are the colors available. Note that there are solids and also mixes of shades called twills, tweeds and heathers. These combinations of colors will give you a very natural look or in the case of Twills, a striped effect of contrasting colors.
http://www.needlestack.com/WebStore/Thread/Madeira_Burmilana.html

I left the strands of the two solid colors I'm using (the lighter is stitched on the back, the more golden from the collar up) lying on the canvas so you could see what this thread looks like. I enjoy using Burmilana, especially for furs. I had intended to use random stitches (a variation of long and short stitch from crewel embroidery) for the dog, but I use it a lot and have noticed a great many folks are very nervous of stitching animals this way. I find it an easy and forgiving stitch but it does take a while to do, so I thought why not branch out and try something else? So here we are. What you see is Knotted Stitch from page 47 of Julia Snyder's Backgrounds & Such. It is a long slanted stitch, similar to Interlocking Goblein except that it has a tiny reversed tent stitch that ties each long stitch down in the middle. I suspect it has other names but I haven't taken the time to see if I can find Knotted Stitch in other stitch dictionaries under another name. [Note that I found Knotted Stitch on page 49 of More Stitches for Effect.]

I have discovered that you need to carefully lay the long stitches for a smooth look, which I am going to need here. I will blend the two shades of tan on the dog's face and probably on the middle of its back to suggest highlights and might add a third shade of brown around his ears. I also will probably top stitch a thin line around his ear with a darker brown. I am not quite sure how this will work so I am going to stitch his face first as it is a smaller area to rip out if this doesn't work the way I think it will. I may rough up the stitch slightly to make it fuzzier also. Haven't decided yet on that.

If you study the picture, you'll see two slightly raised stitches on the left side of the dog near the collar. These are two tent stitches I put in to compensate the edge of the dog's body. They really don't look like the rest of the stitching so I'm only doing full stitches for now until I figure out how to stitch the edge without having the stitches that compensate stick out like this. I may switch to one strand of Burmilana when I do the compensation stitches....

Back to my rut of stitching animals with long and short stitch and random variations of it.

Sue Dulles and Mary Corbert are both writing about long and short stitch and how they work it to realistic effect. Mary is an embroidery teacher, and promises videos later of a project she designed you can work along with her to learn how to do long and short stitch. Sue is a needlepointer. Either or both will have great ideas and help if you want to try a realistic animal or flower in this stitch. Here's Mary's first two postings--

http://www.needlenthread.com/2009/07/long-and-short-stitch-shading-lessons.html

http://www.needlenthread.com/2009/07/long-and-short-stitch-shading-my.html

And here are Sue's, which uses her dog portrait as an example. I highly recommend that you read along and learn how to do long and short stitch. It really does create realistic animals!

http://sudukc.wordpress.com/2009/07/21/week-end-stitching/

http://sudukc.wordpress.com/2009/07/22/how-i-random-stitch/

http://sudukc.wordpress.com/2009/07/24/random-pictures/

After all, if the Knotted Stitches don't seem to be turning out well, I'll probably go back to random long and short to stitch the largest dog. The small dog in the background will probably be in long and short or in tent stitches as it is quite small, too small for Knotted Stitch. So I'll fall back into my rut on this piece elsewhere, but I wanted to try something different and something that more folks would be comfortable trying on their canvases of animals.

Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow
Blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com
Archived Yahoo 360 postings at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chillyhollow

Learning From the Masterful Sharon Garmize

I ran out of time this morning writing about stitching the wooden bar's top and the floor of Cape Cod Dogs before I was able to mention where I got the idea. I read the needlepoint magazines and my stitch books religiously, studying all the projects and photographs with an eye for great ideas I can use elsewhere. Now that there are so many blogs by stitchers, designers and shops, the places to rummage around for ideas on the Internet are endless. But some sources are much better than others, and no one is a better stitcher than the needlepoint designer SharonG.
http://www.sharong.com/

You've probably admired her canvases with their beautiful shading for years. She's one of my very favorite designers as I love realistic designs with beautiful shading, but her designs cover much more. Her art also includes abstract and funny canvases; she immortalizes anything from a fountain pen to a corset to a scarecrow to alley cats to the rear ends of horses. She is Talent Personified. I devour everything she says on her blog. Look at this entry.
http://sharongneedlepointdesigner.blogspot.com/2009/06/ct35-is-newer-canvas-that-now-has.html

Now look at the second photo, the one called Maria's Door (canvas D31). SharonG was stitching this to create a stitch guide for her design and posted a photo of the unfinished canvas. Click on the image to enlarge it and study it carefully. Look at the stone steps and how she changed direction of the darning stitches to show you the side of a step versus the flat top. Study the ruined wall and see how the direction of the stitches change on either side of the wrought iron gate. Notice how she uses different stitches on the sections of the wall to show different materials or a shadow. SharonG is a master of stitching painted canvases as well as designing them.

Looking carefully and critically at what she did with this piece showed me how important stitch direction is for darning and light coverage stitches. When I bought Cape Cod Dogs I knew I wanted to use light coverage stitches for the floor and the top of the bar; when I saw SharonG's canvas of the ruined wall, I knew I would have to take into consideration the flow of the stitches and which direction they were oriented in order to make the wooden planks look good. The bar top itself is on a slant, so I used slanted stitches. (Well, the stitches are horizontal but they run diagonally, giving the slanted effect of stairs seen from the side.) I tried running my stair step stitch on the bar's top with the canvas sitting upright but discovered that I needed to turn the canvas on its side with the window section at the top to make this stitch work.

The floor boards are oriented vertically | with a vanishing point in the back wall. So I stitched those horizontally with a thread that exactly matched the paint in the front section (which explains why you can see these stitches better in the back where the thread and the paint contrast).

You can call me a student of SharonG, as well as an admirer of her painted canvases.

Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow
Blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com
Archived Yahoo 360 postings at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chillyhollow