It was a big weekend for me and stitching, especially in the sense of finally getting pieces over the finish line. I read Jane Greenoff’s Cross Stitch Bible over the Christmas break and she described the process for mounting and framing a piece of needlework so clearly and succintly that I became determined that I would learn to do it myself.
All you need is foamcore and stainless steel pins. Nothing too mysterious about it. The hard part is finding a good frame shop that can provide frames, glass, spacers, cut-to-order foamcore sheets, and hanging kits.
I was fortunate to get the attention of a very knowledgeable and charitable person on the HDF message boards with a post I wrote about the pros and cons of using glass when framing stitchery. She set me straight about the state of the art in conservation materials and suggested I visit Lake City Picture Framing in north Seattle.
This turned out to be the perfect place: they had tons and tons of pre-made frames and they were able to cut pieces of Museum Glass to size on the spot for me. They gave me everything I needed; all I had to do was buy some pins and stick the fabric to the foamcore.
I’ve only done one piece so far, it’s the free Martina Weber design called Rose Garden that I downloaded from her website. It was a heck of a choice for the first time since the design is perfectly square and would demand exact placement in the frame. It took me three tries but I finally got it perfect, at least to my eye.
The glass is the most amazing thing of all, because it is almost invisible from most angles due to some kind of high tech coating borrowed from military applications, where it was developed to make binoculars and other field equipment containing lenses less likely to reflect light and blow someone’s cover. I find it thought-provoking that this same technology is allowing my tiny little stitches to seem part of the world around them at the same time they are enjoying shelter from light and dust.
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I am also mostly finished with my current project, which I seem to be calling “Spooky Flower.” I am pleased with it, more pleased than I was with my last design. The sun took a bit of wrangling at the end but otherwise it went really smoothly, except for the pucker problems caused by the half cross stitches (not tent stitches) in the mountains. I ripped them all out about half way through and did them again basketweave style, going diagonally from stitch to stitch. I also put my q-snap snaps through a dishwasher cycle, which seemed to cause them to get smaller, and grip the frame tighter, eliminating any fabric problems.
One thread of HDF silk over two on 40 seems a little light to me now, and I’m wondering about two threads over two on 36 count linen. I find her Premium to be a little too spongy to work with comfortably, plus I have to confess that I am now the proud owner of her entire regular floss collection, as it existed in the month of December, 2006. I feel a little guilty and decadent but at the same time, I don’t waste money on tons of charts and I am so entranced by the colors. Her floss isn’t like any other floss I’ve seen, because even her solid colors have a complexity to them, a subtle variation in shade due to the hand dyeing process.
My evolution as a stitcher has continued. I have finally joined the ranks of the linen lovers. I’ve put to ground on 40 count Zweigart Newcastle cream linen for my latest project and I can’t imagine using anything else in the future. I was turned off by the coarseness and irregularity and stiffness of the linen I had seen, which had all been at 28 count, and much of it “raw,” which I do not care for at all. But at 40 count, the irregularities get much smaller. The texture is even enough to place cross stitches but not so even that it draws attention to itself, like with the Jobelan. The stitches seem to be in harmony with the fabric, growing out of it organically, not placed like the strands of a pot holder.
Stitching nirvana seems to consist of the above mentioned fabric combined with silk floss, a 28 size Piecemaker needle, my Grip-It Legend, and an LED work lamp, which gives off white light without any heat due to its electrophysical elegance of design.
I have had a hard time with colors for my current project, which I am calling Mystic Flower. The greens are eluding me and I have placed three separate silk orders in addition to taking a trip to the local needlework shop in Issaquah. I had wanted this design to highlight the pairing of shades of sky blue and buttercream but I discovered to my great astonishment last night, after putting in a thread of the yellow, that it completely failed to register against the cream of the background.
It seems obvious now but I still feel pretty stupid and naive for not seeing it coming. I switched to using a much darker earthtone color named Ginger, which I think might still register as yellow. It harmonizes very nicely with the background, but I’m still annoyed at the lack of range available to me. My next original design will be executed on pure white Newcastle, to see just how much range I can get in optimum circumstances.
I also tried some half-stitching around the edges of the circles I did last night but it looked random and frumpy so I left it alone when I redid the yellow in Ginger.
Pictures soon.
I’m almost finished with Tapestry. I’ve learned:
-Putting words inside a piece is primarily an act of insecurity. Let the images speak their own language. It’s the equivalent of drawing a line under the important words in a sentence. It’s tacky and insulting to the viewer. If the words are meant to be the primary focus of a piece, that’s different. I put the title of this piece in the very middle of it, relegating the imagery to illustration, not art.
-Be consistent. For large blocks of color which are meant to appear seamless, make sure that everything about the stitching stays the same all the way through to avoid artifacts. And if one has to frog extensively, wash the fabric afterwards to encourage the frogged fabric to come back to normal before continuing stitching.
-Cotton floss is nice but it’s like working with crayons compared to the precision and vibrance of silk.
-Large swaths of color can be effectively rendered in half-stitches.
-Maximize the foreground, not the background.
I think Tapestry succeeds as a lesson but fails as a finished piece. It is earnest, interesting, and impressive, but not beautiful. I’m trying not to be too sad about this. I look forward to my next piece, which is going to involve plants, roots, the earth, and alchemy. I think I’m going to design it totally in Photoshop. There’s a grid function that I can use, and I can stitch from a printed chart of colored blocks as well as I can from special symbols, as long as I have a legend. I think I can do more sophisticated work in Photoshop because I won’t feel hampered by the interface, the limited colors, and the performance issues associated with Virtual PC.
Time flies when you’re old and getting older. I haven’t posted in three months. In June I thought I’d be finished with Tapestry by August; the thought of it continuing into September dismayed me. Now here it is October and I still have a good chunk of sky to go.
Still, in defense of the piece’s proportions, I would have been finished by now, except that I had to frog the entire section of blue that I had already completed at the bottom around the black silhouettes. I had completed these rows before I hit on turning the canvas upside down as the best way to attack the immensity of the sky. When I turned the canvas upside down I began making x’s from the top left to the bottom right and vice versa, thereby letting the thread travel only on the top side of the canvas. At the bottom I had done the opposite, and so there was as much thread on the bottom side as there was on the top.
It wasn’t until I stitched my last row that I noticed the difference in techniques, and the effect it had on the way the rows appeared. The bottom part was visibly darker than the upper rows. A hard blue line sliced the illusion of a night sky in two.
I was pretty upset, of course, but refused to give in to despair. Before I realized the difference in value was due to the difference in stitching techniques, I reasoned that the longer the blue had time to be in the fabric, the more it plumped up due to ambient humidity. So I got my plant sprayer and wet the entire middle of the fabric.
This was clearly an act of madness and did not help one bit. I realized then that the bottom part had to come out. This took hours to accomplish. Then I started again from the bottom up with the correct stitching technique but when I stitched the first little patch all the way to the last complete row, again there was the dreaded line. So I frogged some more.
Then I realized that the best thing for me to do would be to continue making long rows from the top down like I had been doing the entire rest of the way. This would maximize the homogeneity I so much need to make the blue patch look seamless. This has been the most successful technique so far yet I still detect a difference, especially when looking at the canvas askance. I think it must be due to the way the holes in the canvas have become stretched and widened by the former presence of stitches and the stress of frogging. But I am carrying on and hoping for the best since I have put so much work into this piece. I think no matter how much I sew, every piece will be in some way a learning piece.
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I got my wish for a magic light which has no cord and hovers a foot above my canvas. Vikki Clayton, the force behind Vikki Clayton Silks, brought its presence in this universe to my awareness via a posting on her message board, where I am often found these days. It is (was?) sold by Levenger and it is a joy to work with. I am hoping it lives up to its purported battery life of eight hours. It consists of a dozen white LED lights and when it runs out of power, I simply recharge it via the adapter living in my utility drawer. An effective and tidy solution, I believe.
Still I haven’t stitched much this week. I’ve been busy refining this site and finishing work on my new project book, which I simply adore. It’s all decked out in pink and it provides a relentlessly sequential view of both my past sewing accomplishments and the projects I want to tackle in the future. I like to think of them stretching out endlessly toward the horizon.
Linda_S of Texas puts her finger on it: “There is a very fine line between ‘hobby’ and ‘mental illness.’”
