Found Marie!

After going crazy looking for her I finally found Marie in the paper racks.  It was a very safe place because I didn't find the embroidery for several days.  So hopefully I will get back to her tomorrow.

Lee took me out to buy some needlepoint wool at Betty's.  I got 51 colors to add to the 8 colors I had already.  So now I just have to decide on a pattern for a pillow.  I've been looking at some patterns in "Needleplay " and "More NeedlePlay" by Erica Wilson.  There are a few cute ideas.  But I would really like to come up with my own designs.  Certainly I have enough colors to make something quite colorful.  Afterwards we went to a thrift store and tried to buy a litho of a ballroom dance set in the 1780's.  The picture was screwed to the wall so they will call me when they can get it down!  This will be great for the Altrusa tree!  Then we bough some blackboard paint for some cabinets and came home.

Yesterday I started another needle painting.  This is of a yellow poppy and it is going quite well.  The next needle painting will be an iris.  I found a nice outline drawing of an iris and this time I will pick the colors, shading and determine the stitch angle all on my own.  Sounds like a fun challenge!

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!

Wild Pansies Finished

Slowly I have been doing the lessons from "Needle Painting Embroidery" and finally finished lesson 10 Wild Pansies.  The projects get harder as you progress and use many more colors.  The trick to doing these lessons is the long and short stitch.  I have found the long and short stitch difficult to do because my hands shake and doing precise stitching takes four or fives tries to get the needle in the right place.  So I am actually doing a more random stitch which gives more of a blending effect.  The wild pansies took about 16 hours to stitch.  The original colors from the book were red violets with a bright pink added.  So for this lesson I picked out the pansy colors myself.  I also changed the way the pansy face looked.  It is a lousy picture below because I am still learning how to use a new camera.  Even with the cameras ability to take my shaking into account this was the best picture I got.  The background is white so the camera is having some problems.  It does feel good to get the first square embroidered for the quilt.  Just need 19 more squares.  The next square I want to try is an orchid design based on the most resent orchid in my collection.  Just need to get the drawing right.  Until then I think I will finish the Marie picture.

Wild pansies.

Back to Embroidering Pansies

Yesterday I went out to shop at Michael's.  This was a bad idea for several reasons.  The heat yesterday was hot for us and being out 2 hours was hard.  The coupon was for 40% off the entire purchase starting at 4:00 PM.  So I went a bit early and there were only 6 people shopping.  So I managed to get through the crowd of shoppers!  I was able to find some lovely white flowers for a bridal head wreath.  The plan is to finish the wreath in the next couple of days.  Then I went to the frame section and was a bit disappointed that they didn't have many old style frames.  I finally decided on this fake Marcasite frame with fleur de lys at the corners.  The frame is 5 x 7 inches and that turns out to be as small as shows all of Marie.  It also cuts out a lot of background that I would have had to embroider.  So I am rather happy with the frame.  While at Michael's I also bought some embroidery floss for me.

Frame for embroidery.

It was exhausting to go shopping but I have enough supplies for now.  To give my sore fingers a break I worked on the wild pansy some more.  The colors are different from the lesson because I hated the colors the author chose.  The original was in Anchor threads so the DMC equivalents may have just been off.  So this is my first try at picking out colors.  Not quite right but pretty enough.  When this is finished it will be the first quilt square for the embroidered yoyo quilt!

Needle painted wild pansy lesson number 10.

Marie Antonette Embroidered Picture

Doing two Altrusa trees this year has meant a lot of planning and starting early on the decorations and gifts.  So far I have volunteered for several decorations but I am not sure what gifts I could make.  The thing I like about our groups tree is that we don't throw money at them.  We make almost all of the stuff ourselves.  Some members do donate money for the supplies to make things, which is very generous.  We also get things from thrift stores and fix up.  One gift idea that I've had was a pair of crystal earrings.  I bought 2 large pink crystals that will be used to dangle large woven gold drops.  The crystals will made into cabochons sew in with gold or pearl beads, haven't made my mind up yet!  That is as far as I've gotten making gifts!

Last night I was looking at a friends pintrest page, http://pinterest.com/lindageorgeadis/marie-antoinette/ , and came across a lovely picture of Marie Antoinette and decided to embroider the picture as a gift.  I could have turned the image into a cross-stitch or needlepoint.   But instead I printed the image on cotton canvas and started embroidering sections to bring out the image.

Original printed image of Marie Antoinette onto cotton canvas.

When starting this kind of project deciding what to do first can be daunting.  So I took one thread of gray DMC and started embroidering straight stitches to add detail to the feathers in her hat.  This gave me the courage to keep working.  Besides all of the thread and color challenges there is also the challenge of getting the needle through the fabric.  The fabric is a commercially processed sheet that can go through a printer.  The fabric is very thick and besides bending several needles I also bruised my fingers when the eye end went into my fingers because the point end would not go through the fabric.

  Feather enhanced by straight stitches in grey DMC thread

and variegated silk ribbon added to the hair.

This style of embroidery is completely different from the more standard embroidery forms.  Unlike embroidery patterns whether to leave something plain or stitching to enhance a section is entirely up to the embroiderer.  The most helpful thing is to have a wide variety of embroidery supplies.  In this piece I have used silk sewing threads and ribbon, DMC floss, silver passing, crewel and needlepoint fibers.  In the above picture the feathers are enhanced by straight stitches in grey DMC thread

and variegated silk ribbon added to the hair.  On the right hand side of her neck bullion knots in dark gray DMC were added.  The darker shaded hair and smaller stitches make her hair recede into the background.  The color of gray was similar to the artists choice of color.

Curls added to the left neck area using crewel acrylic yarn in pale gray

and seed pearls added to form the necklace.

After enhancing the feathers I had thought to leave the hair simple with a few silver stitches.  But the curls were so tempting!  So I used a white acrylic crewel yarn and a silver crewel yarn and formed them into loops.  Then the loops were tacked down on top of the hair.

How to Make the Loops.

The loops were very easy to make!

Step 1:  Thread a needle with a strong thread matching the color of the curls, I used silk sewing thread.  Hold the thread along a dowel and wrap the hair fiber around the dowel and thread.

Wrapping the hair fiber around a dowel and encasing a sewing thread.

Step 2:

Once the loops are as long as you want for one area, sew through the hair fiber with the encased sewing thread.    Make sure to pierce through the actual hair fiber as you sew.  Keep sewing through until all the loops are sewn loosely together.

Sewing through the hair fiber.

Step 3: 

Sew the fibers through again going in the opposite direction.  Tie a small knot at the end of the loop with the sewing thread.  Be careful not to pull to tight.

Sew back through the hair fibers, do not tighten to much.  The loops should be sewn close together.

Step 4: 

Slip the hair fiber loops off the skewer and sew in place using the same sewing thread.



Finished hair loops ready to be sewn into place.

Loops starting to form hair on left side of head.

Bullion knots form tighter curls on right side of head.

Hair added to left hand side of head is made with darker variegated crewel fibers and is formed by making bullion knots.  This forms tighter curls which gives the impression that right side of her face is turned away slightly.  This is a simple trick to form depth to the picture.

Silver passing is used to give detail to the lace edge.

The last thing that I did last night was to start enhancing the lace on her dress with silver passing thread.  This was a bit tricky because after so much work I was afraid that the silver thread wouldn't work and I would have ruined the embroidery.  But it came out fine!  I used short lengths of silver thread and straight stitches.  I worked the silver following the white edge in the lace.

View of dress after silver passing was added to the lace.

Some of the bullions knots on her right side are a bit dark and I may do them over again.  The bouquet in her hand has stems and leaves but I still need to figure out how to make the rose.  The next big step is embroidering the background.  The trick is to make the background interesting and at the same time not so detailed that it is to busy.  Now to try and not destroy the picture today by doing something stupid!

This Last Weekend

Actually had a really nice weekend.  Saturday I went to the EGA meeting.  They were teaching how to cover candy tins and how to twist embroidery floss into cording.  Instead of attending the class I started a bargello needlepoint in pink and green wool.  This was the first needlepoint that I had worked on in over 30 years.  It wasn't that easy to get started but it got easier as I progressed.  The trick is to copy the pattern line and then repeat it making sure that you are going over the correct number of threads.

 

Bargello needlepoint.

 

The pattern is so easy that it only took me three days to get it finished.  Needlepoint doesn't have the appeal that it once did but that doesn't mean it isn't pretty and useful.  This piece is probably going to me made into a pillow.  Today I got out all the needlepoint books I have which is only six.  The book "More Needlepoint Designs" by Lou Gartner is very interesting.  The author's goal is to teach needle workers to chart or paint their own designs.  To trust in their ability to stitch without a specific "this color stitch goes here".  It is an interesting book and it has a lot of pattern outlines to start stitching.  It also has color photo to help determine colors and shading.  It is a lot like painting with a needle.

 

Sunday I put in beans and watermelons into the garden.  The garden is slowly it is getting bigger and we now have several tomatoes.  I also started some cantaloupe seeds sprouting.

 

 

Tomato plant.

 

Here is a picture of a new orchid.  Sally is a lovely pink shade.

 

 

 

Sally she is small but lovely.

 

 

Flowers pots in an wash tub.  This was to disguise a drain in the yard and be easy to move.

 

After weeks on a wheat less diet I had pizza from the best deli in town and watched "Red Dwarf" on Netflix.  I should have been eating toast but I love pizza more!