A Lesson in Blogging and Needle Painting

Every once in a while when I'm looking at images posted to the Internet I actually see some of my projects.  I love seeing what I've made and hoping that someone might be inspired to try the projects themselves.  Last night I was looking at images of needle painting.  Going through the images I recognised a quilt layout I had posted in my blog.  The program that grabs images grabbed the quilt image instead of the needle painting picture near it.  So from now on I'm going to try and keep to a subject so the images go into the right category.  Just seems that blogs should be about a lot of stuff because everything in life effects everything else.

The needle painting exercises are slowly coming along.  I was going to work on the Marie A. stumpwork piece but I put it somewhere safe which usually means that I will never find it again.  Yes, I have looked in the freezer!

Needle Painted violet, lesson 5 from

Needle Painting Embroidery by Trish Burr.


Some Thoughts on Needle Painting

Finally I finished the needle painted violet.  The leaf alone took more than 700 stitches. The first try at it came out so badly I thought that I may not be able to learn the needle painting technique.  But this violet came out much better.  I am not actually able to keep up the long and short stitch.  Starting out I create the long and short stitch along the stab stitched outline.  The next row of stitches is where I start having a problem.  When I start stitching the second row the obvious stitching pattern bothers me.  So I usually start randomizing the stitch length and placement.  I let my needle wander around but I always pierce back into the previous row of stitches.  Every few stitches I like to take a stitch back two rows.  This causes a blending effect, so to many longer stitches and you will loose the shading effect.  Also I angle the stitches along the growing pattern for the plant.  To angle the stitches correctly I find looking at a flower or a picture of one helps.  Getting the angle of the stitches seems the hardest part of this technique.  Another tricky part of needle painting is choosing colors.  Colors that are to close can blend into each other so that it doesn't look like you've shaded at all.  Like most techniques it just takes practice.  A good book helps too!