Yarn on order

The tapestry is at a standstill until the yarn I ordered last week, arrives. I hope it will be here any day now. In the meantime, it stands propped against a cabinet.

So I'm tackling another needlepoint which was started a few years ago. As you can see, it has a lot in common with the large tapestry. Same designer (Candace Bahouth), same colors, same flowers, and a similar border (although totally abstract). The design is called "Meadow Garden" and it will be a pillow. The scale of it is quite different, obviously. It is worked in a single yarn at 10 stitches to the inch.

The spring weather here has completely collapsed. We've had rain for almost a week and that is to continue through tomorrow. I noticed this morning that we have another 3 days of rain forecast for next week. The rain is good but it has created challenges for getting the yard cleaned up and the garden in order. It's also been quite cool. So much so that I haven't started any seeds indoors yet; it's just not warm enough. I may have to bite the bullet and buy nursery plants this year because soon it will be too late to start tomatoes and what not.

Lots of ticks this year so far and yesterday was officially the beginning of black fly season. The black flies will mostly disappear in a few weeks and the tick situation usually abates somewhat after the initial spring fling.

Wild flowers are making a show though. This week saw the Trillium and Violets and Wild Phlox make an appearance. The Rhododendron is blossoming now. It looks like we're at least a few weeks out from having Lilacs.

Floral Trellis

A few posts ago I mentioned Kaffe Fassett's "Floral Trellis" needlepoint rug and how I was enquiring about whether or not it was available as a kit.

I found out it was available as a kit at the time the book I was perusing was published, 1987. The Ehrman US office did not know of any available kits and I have not called the UK office yet.

However, I was just browsing needlepoint kits on eBay and found someone selling the printed canvas, only--no yarn--and the bidding is already up to $999! I suppose that price reflects the rarity of the item. I will not be bidding on it and the auction ends tomorrow.

Floral Trellis

Shuffling the design

This needlepoint I'm working on came in the form of a kit containing yarn and a printed canvas. It's possible to do needlepoint without a printed canvas by working from a chart. It would be considered counted needlepoint and I've done some pillows this way. I've also done a pillow working from a photograph of a pillow without the chart. The resolution was just good enough for me to see the distinct stitches.

Another alternative is hand painted canvas and they are expensive--needless to say. I've never worked from a hand painted canvas but I imagine they are very accurate. Accuracy is sometimes lost in printed canvas and I suspect it's especially true of a large canvas like the one I'm working. The printing process needs to lay down the correct color at the intersection of two canvas threads and if the registration is off at all or if the canvas slips, or whatever else I know not, the color can end up straddling a space instead of covering an intersection.

When I come across this in the canvas I simply decide--by looking at the overall pattern and neighboring areas--whether to move the color up or down, and always within the same area, move the colors consistently in one direction.

This picture shows colors out of alignment. The canvas intersections are half yellow and half another color. I have to decide whether to move the colors up or down:

If the printing went askew at the borders, the line between the design and the border could be jeopardized, ending up jarred--broken between two different rows and this will 1) be very obvious and 2) look like a mistake. This picture shows how the bottom edge of the pattern goes astray:

Looking at the right arrow shows that the last row of the wide border comes up to the green border. If we keep the bottom of the design on the same row--which we must if we want to avoid something that looks like a mistake--then by the time we get to the left arrow, we see the printing alignment gradually going off and eventually the top of the green border is a whole row lower than it was on the right.

This happened at the top of the canvas as well. I am having to make adjustments by dropping the last line of the design as it floats away from the current line (see bottom circle below). It will become part of the green border.

Since there is a solid double line above the wide border as well (top circle below), I've had to improvise here as well. If you follow the two red arrows at the top, going from the right to the left you can see that the line would be broken if I kept to the misaligned printing, and since I don't want that I'm dropping a line above the border and adding one below it. I'm making up the pattern for this row as I go along, pointed to by the blue arrow, ignoring what's printed and basing it on what the design is doing. (According to the canvas this would be the bottom row of the double line, but I've had to keep the double line higher to avoid it skipping down a row.) The wide border pattern is quite abstract so it's pretty hard to go astray, just about anything works.

By the way. . . I'm at the bottom!!! Can't believe it. Will be done soon. But I have to order some yarn and will have to wait for it to arrive before I can really finish it.

With Kaffe Fassett's help

Coming up short on yarn quantities is continuing to challenge my ability to squeeze out every last millimeter available. I knew it would be down to the wire with a light blue I've been working and I ended up 1 to 2 strands short (each strand is 36" long, it gets doubled so each working thread is 18" long, the perfect length).

I phoned the company this morning to get the lo down on ordering more yarn. It was a pleasant conversation and the logistics are clear so I'll be keeping track of what I'll need to order. Or will I? . . . 

Another objective for phoning Erhman Tapestry was to see if they produced Kaffe Fassett's "Floral Trellis" needlepoint rug as a kit. I would love to make it, it's quite spectacular, albeit I image a kit for it would cost a pretty penny. Anyhow, I took out his book "Glorious Needlepoint" to make sure I had the correct name of the design. The book is so beautiful and I got lost in it, eventually coming upon this bit in the introduction on designing one's own needlepoints:

It is very important to have quite a few of your colours in crewel weight. This is about one-third the weight of regular tapestry yarn and is used for petit-point and embroidery. Crewel is invaluable when doing subtle shadings, combining two or three colours in each stitch. It is also a life saver when you run out of a colour in full flow, miles from a shop. Just take two similar colours in crewel and you can make an amazing match ...

Well! I remembered the crewel wool I ordered a few months ago in many shades of red, yellow, green, and blue, plus a few browns. So I dug them out and found two shades of blue that when combined 2 stands of one with 1 strand of the other makes a great substitute for the blue that I ran out of! I was so happy about this because I'd been rummaging through all my tapestry yarns from previous projects to see if there was a close matching blue, to no avail.

Brilliant!

The two shades of blue that I used:

And the result, comparing the kit's yarn with my mixed crewel yarn. The right circled light blue is the kit's original yarn, the left circle highlights my 'homemade' mix:

I love Kaffe Fassett! I have several of his books and it's easy to get lost in them for hours.

I will however have to order some yarn because the quantity I am going to need of the dark background is going to be more than what I want to 'make work'. When I pulled the kit out of storage in January, after not working on it for a few years, I discovered some moth damage in the darkest yarn. Not too too bad, but enough that I will have to place an order.

Change in set up

I had to stop using the suspended frame (from the ceiling in front of the sofa, if you recall) for stitching because it was leading me into "bad use" of my body. The cushions are old and the sofa is low and has very little support overall. Even though I put a board under the cushions I found myself scrunched up in a less than comfortable position all too often. Considering that I can spend up to 2 hours at a time in that position it's surprising it lasted as long as it did. For the past few months I've worked in that manner. But I was noticing it in my body so I took out my old stand and now I'm sitting in a proper wooden chair at a correct height. And it feels better.

Regarding needlework, the advice of not throwing anything away is well heeded indeed! I just finished working the petals of these orange flowers and was down to looking through the end pieces of prior work to find enough of the correct color. I used up every last bit of the lighter of the two oranges and I'm left with one strand of the darker orange, which I will need for a bud a little further down the tapestry. I actually had to use a short length of an intermediate orange to finish one bud (circled in red). It is totally unnoticeable.

When I have finished this "row" of stitching (which should be over the weekend) I will have only one row left and the bottom border. Can't believe it!

We had a strong flirtation with spring a week ago but have since had to contend with a bit more wintery weather. We had about 3 inches of snow Monday and there is another storm of mixed precipitation forecast for the weekend. Oh well, it won't be long now. I'm not having to stoke the fire as frequently now that the day temps are in the 30s and sometimes 40s, but most nights still need the heat.

With April around the corner I'm starting to think about which flowers I would like to start from seed. I suspect the price of potted plants will be quite high this spring so sowing seed will be much more economical.

 

Tapestry glitch and the Red Dress

As I am nearing the bottom of the tapestry, some of the thread colors are running out, as to be expected--as long as I don't completely run out. But I did run out of one of the yellows. My stitches are done in one of the recommended techniques (continental) and I think I'm fairly conservative in the use of thread. There was almost enough thread, but just barely not. Oh, well.

Of course, I can contact the company and order some more thread but they are in England and I don't want to wait for just a small area so I decided "to make it work". A picture of the affected Irises is below. Each Iris is supposed to be two-tone only, cream and pale yellow. The pale yellow is what ran out while I was stitching the bottom Iris. So I decided to use some gold wool to add shading to the blossom in two places. It works really well in one place because it's obviously the underside of the petal, and it works OK on the other petal. I hope the gold isn't too dark. When I've finished the whole thing I'll see what's left, thread wise, and decide whether or not the gold distracts. I think it will be OK.

It does mean this one flower is not in the same flat style as the others, but it's not too obvious and it's a big tapestry so I suspect it will go unnoticed. Truth be told, I like the shading.

Top Iris is all cream and yellow, bottom right Iris should be the same but you can see my use of gold to add shading:

 Yes, I think it's an OK solution.

Marion at Marion's World visited The Red Dress, a 14-year international collaborative embroidery project. It's spectacular! It is scheduled to come to North America next year I think, and I'm going to see if it will be anywhere near me. I'd love to see it in person. Extraordinary!

Politics

A political post because the times demand it.