Framed Winds

Here she is! This is my framed The Winds of Color, designed by Elsa Parrish. Unfortunately, the mat colors didn't show up very well in the picture. The inner mat is a pale silver paper mat, and the outer mat is a very dark mauve suede. The frame is actually wooden, but painted silver with purpley-red streaks.

It took a very long time to find the right framing selection, and this was made worse by the need to visualize it as a circle! Overall, I'm very pleased! I haven't yet found a place for this to hang, but I don't have to worry about it yet. I really want to send this in to the exhibit at the ANG National Seminar. Wish me luck!

A big happy dance: Winds of Color

Here she is! Winds of Color, designed by Elsa Parrish.This piece was a lot of fun and included many challenges. The last challenge is to decide whether or not to leave the metallic streaks in the hair as they are or to make them thinner. These are done in the old spooled DMC metallic, in which 1 strand is made up of three plies of a thin metallic thread. I used the entire strand, but I need to put it aside for a bit to see if I want to change it to only one ply. Opinions are welcome!

Thanks to all who left birthday wishes and who have encouraged me in the progress of this piece!

Update: I did end up reducing the number of plies of metallic in the hair. It's a bit hard to tell from the photo, since the flash picks up on the metallic, but it looks a lot better in person. Thanks to all who voted for this! And a big thank you for all the lovely comments!

Winds & Wurth

Thursday evening, I finished the dress in Winds of Color. If you'll recall, I didn't like the transition to the really light pink in the bodice of the dress. I thought that the fourth section from the top was too light. I raided my stash, and found I had another skein of this color that was a few shades brighter than the one in the kit. (For the record: yes, this was DMC. There can be differences between dyelots.) I also found a "better" (for my purposes) skein of the color for the top-most section in my stash, too.

After I fixed the dress, I started the lady's hair. I had my doubts at first about the colors: a bright blue and two shades of mauve. After I started, though, it made sense. The blue is around the edges and in a few places in the middle, showing where the dark sky is showing through the less dense areas. The lightest mauve is used for highlights, and everything else is the darker mauve, which actually turns out looking like a brown with violet-red undertones.

The hair is all stitched in french knots. As I've said before, I like french knots. Unfortunately, I've discovered that stitching mass quantities of french knots triggers my early-stage carpal tunnel syndrome because of the twisting motion used in making the knots. It took a while for it to flare up at first, so I was able to get quite a bit done. After about an hour of stitching yesterday, I started to get the familiar tingling in the thumb, forefinger, and ring finger of my right hand. Being right-handed, loss of feeling in these fingers means I can't continue to hold the needle. This is not very conducive to stitching progress! I had to start alternating between this project and another: one length of thread (sometimes less) on the hair, one or two lengths on the second project. The picture shows where I left things yesterday.

I can hear some of you asking: what was the "other" project? After running some errands, DH and I came home to a perfectly-timed package tucked inside the garage: the latest in the Dodecagon Series by Jim Wurth! Old Country is a combination of orange, red, purple, and dark green. Orange is not one of my favorite colors, but with this combination, it looks great! I was able to stitch quite a bit on this last night. The center area stitched up very quickly! The picture definitely does not do this piece justice. There are lots of metallics, and the sparkle doesn't show up in the picture!

Most of a dress

Winds of Color is getting there!

As I mentioned on Friday, the dress is working up quickly. However, I want to take a bit out. The rose-colored sections in the dress are the DMC 600 series. I think the some of the skeins in my kit are a bit faded, since the transition to light pink happened a bit too fast. The bright pink section on the left hip is DMC 602, and above that is 603, 604, and 605. There seemed to be too much of a jump between 602 and 603. A glance at my DMC color card confirms that these colors (603-605) are not quite right in my kit.

So, when I next sit down with this, I'll be ripping out at least the top three stitched sections of the dress. That might not happen for a while, though. Our ANG meeting is next Wednesday (5/14), and I'm supposed to be leading the group starting Mystery in a Corner by Gay Ann Rogers. I guess that means I should have a good portion of it done by then! :-)

It's getting breezy around here...

Well, after working intently on Cinders for a week, I had to push her to the side for a bit. Winds of Color was calling again from the WIP pile.

Yes, Jocelyn, your favorite lady is back on the top of the pile! (If anyone wants a smile, check out Jocelyn's LOL comment on my goals post, begging for Winds to be finished.) I had actually already resumed stitching on this before my post yesterday. Finally, all of the outline stitch on the right side is done, and the satin stitch of the dress is working up quickly. There's a bit more outline stitch as the lower scarf drifts off to the sky on the left side. The hair will be done entirely in french knots (and I actually like french knots!). The last touches will be a few things added on top of the existing stitching, though I can't recall the details right now.

Rivers, more sky, and a bit of dress

What a difference! The Treasure Ribbon was much, much, much easier to work with than 4 ply of the DMC spool metallic. I like the color of the rivers now, too!

I've been gradually working on the packed stem stitch. I know I had mentioned that the instructions called for packed outline stitch. Before starting these areas, I looked up the difference between stem and outline, since I can never remember. I ended up stitching stem stitch despite looking it up! For this purpose, it really doesn't matter, anyway. Since I started to get tired of stem stitch, I decided to start rewarding myself with stitching bits of the dress, which is padded satin stitch. Satin is much more of a standard canvas technique. I like the way the stem stitch areas are coming out, but I guess I'm still more comfortable with counted stitches rather than making the gazillion decisions about stitch length and angle and how to blend the colors along the curve of each area.In a comment about this piece on my last post, Jocelyn asked,

"I have been wondering how big it is, and if you have any plans yet, on how you will finish it? Mount it in a frame? What sort of frame?"

The circle of Winds is 10" across. I haven't really thought much about how it will be finished. If I can't find an appropriate circular frame, I'll likely have mats cut with an inner circle in a square frame. What colors? Who knows? My framer's really good with color. She'll keep throwing different possibilities at it until it "clicks". Thanks for asking, and thanks to everyone else for the great comments!

A busy week!

I can't believe it's been over a week since I last posted. This week was very busy with stitching activities. Only occasionally does the first Monday of the month fall in the same week as the second Wednesday, and when it does, it means we have meetings for both EGA and ANG in the same week, plus stitch night at the LNS on Thursday. Strangely enough, I didn't stitch much at all at the guild meetings, and I tried to make up for it the rest of the week, to the neglect of my blog.

Winds of Color is progressing nicely, though.I finished the darning areas in the sky, and once stitched, I found I liked it. During the stitching, I had my doubts! I've started the areas on the right side that are packed outline stitch.

Right now there are only two parts I want to restitch:

• The area of sky on the left side with the blue grid looks really strange. I'm going to take it out, darken the background, and stitch it again.
  
• Also, I need to take out the river. This piece was designed in 1991, using threads available at that time. This is stitched with 4 strands of that DMC metallic that came on a spool. It's really hard to tame, plus I actually bent a needle trying to pull it (using hemostats) through the congress cloth and the existing stitches with all of the thread bulk. It's also not the best color here. While I was putting it in, I thought about all of the nice metallic ribbons that have been introduced in more recent years. After a trip to the LNS today, I've got a light blue card of Treasure Ribbon from Rainbow Gallery. Hopefully that will be easier to use and look better.

It looks like I'm going to have to forfeit this round of my WIP-loss challenge. While I had listed my two classes with Marion Scoular, coming up next weekend, as exemptions, I did not do the same for the new Gay Ann Rogers mystery. We're doing that as a group project for ANG, and I need to start it ASAP, since I volunteered to lead the group. Can I call another exemption partially through a round? If it makes a difference, I've decided I'm not going to turn in one of the GCCs I signed up for but never started - and I had made that an exemption! :-)

Open canvas

In response to one of my previous posts, Lelia commented that the idea of coloring the canvas before stitching was interesting. Since I've recently stitched some of the colored areas, the benefits of that coloring can be seen. I've mentioned before that Winds of Color was designed as an exercise in shading. One way to shade needlework is to color the background, then use a stitch that does not completely cover the background.

The areas 13, 14, 14a, and 15, shown at right, are all examples of this open stitch shading. In area 13, only one color of thread and one type of stitch was used. The colored background makes the difference from one end of the area to the other. The same is true for area 14. In area 15, both the background and the thread value changed.

Coloring Winds

In my last post, I mentioned that I was stuck on a part of Winds of Color. I'd been working the sections of the design in the order they showed up in the instructions (in case you were wondering why I was jumping around so much). After I finished the areas of underside couching (areas 11, 11a, 12), I read ahead a bit.

The instructions for area 14 say something about "the greyed areas of the canvas". Ummm... my area 14 isn't shaded at all. Ok, how about 14a: "area is painted in a very dark tone". Mine must be a very dark white!

There's an explanation for this. This was originally designed as a teaching piece, and part of the class time was designated for coloring areas of the canvas. When I ordered it, many years after it was originally taught, the canvas came colored already, but apparently a couple of areas were missed. Unfortunately, the instructions didn't provide details for the "permanent marking pens" called out on the materials page. I emailed Elsa Parrish, the designer.

In the meantime, I stitched a bit on areas of the sky. Here are areas 16 (dark blue) and 16a (lavender), both done in open versions of encroaching gobelin. I also started area 18, the background sky, stitched in a darning stitch.














It turned out that Ms. Parrish replied very promptly to tell me the type of marker (Prismacolor) and the colors I needed. Yesterday, I took my canvas to a local art store. The store didn't have the complete line of Prismacolor pens, but I was able to find colors that were fairly close to the originals. When I got home, I very carefully colored in the areas (area 14a was particularly tough, since it was completely surrounded by stitching), and managed to get just a minimal amount of ink on the surrounding threads. (I figure that will help the areas blend better. :-P )
I also put a very light layer of the navy color on top of the existing mottling of area 17. I had tried to start that area, but it's a very open stitch, and the white was just too stark. I'm also thinking of taking out the darning stitches in the sky and trying to darken that area a bit. What do you think?

Sky & Clouds

Since I last posted about Elsa Parrish's Winds of Color, it's progressed nicely.

On the right side, an area with double hungarian stitch with blended threads has been added. This area was an interesting challenge because instead of stitching full stitch repeats with a given color, the emphasis was on directing the colors through the full shape of the area. I started with the lightest color, working it down and to the right, doing parts of the stitch repeats. After I thought I had enough of that color, I blended two strands of the lightest with two strands of the next shade, working around the previous stitches. The toughest part was keeping an eye on the stitch pattern to make sure it would work out after the other colors were added.

Three areas of underside couching have been stitched, also. (Actually, it's called underside couching in the instructions; I didn't pull the top thread to the back as is shown in the link. There are just tiny couching stitches on top of the fabric.) These areas are the gray cloud on the left side, the area under the green trees, and the light blue/lavender areas of the sky. It's really neat how the couching enhances the coloration of the background without overwhelming it.

I've got some questions about two of the areas that are up soon, so I've emailed the designer. I guess I'll be skipping ahead to other areas as I continue to work on this.

Improved color transition

In my post last Sunday (has it really been that long?), I mentioned that I didn't like the color transitions in the right side of the scarf on Winds of Color. I didn't like the compensation I was using. Here's how it looked:See all of those itty bitty stitches along the line where the color changed? They broke up the repeat of the stitch pattern. It looked awkward, plus it was nearly impossible to continue the stitch sequence on the left side of the transition.

A bit of ripping ensued. I then restitched the transition without breaking up any of the stitch pattern. The result: Even though the color transition is a bit more chopped up when observed closely, when you take a step back, it flows better because the stitches themselves aren't split up between colors. (i.e. I'm not breaking up an over-two stitch into two separate over-one stitches in two different colors.) This looks much better and it's easier to keep the stitch pattern going.

The lady is slowly progressing!

More Winds & new storage

The lady is progressing a bit slowly this week. One of her scarves is done on the left side, and the part in progress on the right is meant to be part of a scarf also.

This scarf is done in Hungarian stitch, but the colors are changing along the length, too. The shading technique used here is called "hardside shading", and only a single color of thread is used in the needle at any one time (as opposed to blending threads in the needle). In this technique, when you reach the line marking the color change, the stitch is supposed to be compensated.

The trouble is, it's really tough to keep the pattern of the stitch in such a skinny area, especially with all the compensating stitches. I going to frog (rip-it!) a bit and not compensate in the middle of a stitch length. I may still do, for example, the first stitch (over 2) with one color, then the remaining two stitches of the pattern (over 4, then over 2) with another color, but I don't think I like splitting a given stitch length. The pattern of the stitches should show up better if I don't compensate the stitch lengths, and I'll enjoy stitching it more. Does that make sense? I'll try to take a before and after picture to explain when I rip it out tomorrow.

On another note, I bought a new floss cabinet today! For the first time ever, I visited the local "Christmas Tree Shops". It's an odd name for a discount store, but it's appropriate at least for one season out of the year! This store opened over a year ago, and I had heard that some good deals could be had there. I didn't know what to really expect. It was sort of like "Target meets the dollar store". A friend said it was like a flea market - there was quite a bit of junk, but you could find really good stuff if you looked!

I picked up a few things, but the real reason I went was for a cabinet I saw in an ad. I couldn't find the cabinet advertised, but I did find a great 7-drawer lingerie chest - a.k.a. FLOSS CABINET! It was marked down from $130 to $100, and it was completely solid wood, and came fully assembled (except for the feet). I had brought a couple of Floss Away bags with me, and this worked perfectly!

When I got home, I made a few drawer dividers out of cardboard, and transferred my DMC collection to the cabinet. It took 3 of the seven drawers, but the bags fit perfectly, just as I hoped! I'm headed back tomorrow to buy another cabinet!

Check out the perfect fit:

Update on Winds of Color

For the last few days, I've been stitching on Winds of Color. I finished the lady's skin and the dark blue clouds surrounding the pink on the left side. These were all in basketweave. Today I completed the moon (which I originally thought was the sun, but the text says otherwise!) and the lavender areas around it. These areas were stitched in skip tent to let the shading of the background show through.

Unfortunately, the line through the middle of the section also shows through! On the picture of the finished piece, there is some stitching over that line, but I can't find anything in the directions that tells me what that stitch is. I think I'll try a stem or outline stitch.

WIP-loss Challenge: Round 2

I've started a new piece, and I'm off on round 2 of the WIP-loss challenge. I'm changing the rules a bit for this round. This time, I'm going to finish at least 3 before starting another. The "at least" portion is described in Rule #2.

The rules for this round are:

1. Continue to have fun!
   
2. The "to be finished" list must include my new start (To the Acorn) and Winds of Color. At least one other small item must be finished, but the challenge won't be over until these two larger pieces are done.
   
3. The term finished means the completion of stitching. It does not mean the completed item must be framed or otherwise made into a useful item.
   
4. While selling, giving away, or trashing unwanted UFOs may reduce the total pile, they don't count toward the total finished.
   
5. Exceptions are allowed, if declared up-front. These pieces don't count for starting or finishing. Here are my exceptions:
• the Jim Wurth dodecagon ornament series
• gift stitching for a special occasion or for a Quaker exchange
• the class projects to be taught by Marion Scoular when she visits area EGA chapters in April**
  
• any GCC that I'm starting to panic about finishing on time to send in for evaluation. I can foresee at least one of these, but it's due after To the Acorn, so I hope I don't have to use this exception.
  

Does anyone want to join me for this round? Feel free to adapt these rules to fit your situation. Hopefully this round won't take me another 5+ months.


**Edited to add the projects from Marion Scoular. I'm the one setting up one of the classes, yet I forgot to make this an exemption! :-)

Not nearly as small

It was a bit of a switch to go from the hummingbird, which is about 2" across on 40ct, back to Winds of Color, 10" round on 24ct congress cloth. Even though they're so different, I love working on all kinds of ground fabrics (except for the really tough cotton jean fabric used for Montmellick work, but that's another story). I was so glad to see, from one of the comments, that my gauze work may inspire one stitcher to try 40ct again.

Yesterday I finished the ground on Winds. This was done in a stitch called Victorian step, and was another area shaded by combining different colors of floss in the needle. I'll add some rivers on top of this later.

I've since moved on to an area on the left side, midway between the uppermost tree and the woman's arm. It's stitched entirely in white, but the stitch slant changes for each row, so it provides directional shading. At least, that's what it says in the instructions. I've never really thought of this play of light as "shading", so it will be interesting to see the final effect as the other sections around it get filled in.

And the winner is...

Winds of Color! That's the piece my local ANG chapter members picked for me to finish this year. I'm glad, because I'm enjoying it. It was pretty close, though. All three pieces received several votes, and that wasn't the case for everybody's choices.

This meeting was a blast. It's the first time I can remember that everyone stayed until the very end of the meeting/program. It was fun to hear the reasons (excuses?) as to why various pieces have been neglected. We're thinking we may do it at some time for the EGA chapter, too. I may put up a poll here for my blog friends to vote on one of my other large WIPs.

Some ground work

I've been making some slow progress on Winds of Color. The trees are all done, and I've moved on to the ground on the right side. The rambling dividing line between the darkest blue and the lavender/blue tweeded area (on the right side) will get some over-stitching eventually to become a river.

Our ANG meeting tonight promises to be fun. Each member will be bringing in two or three UFOs, started at least a year ago (except for one member who is way too organized and seems to finish everything in a timely fashion, but we love her anyway). The group will be voting to assign which UFO each person should finish this year.

For example, I'm bringing in Winds of Color, Scottlee, and Wheels of Color. They'll select one, and I'll be assigned to finish it in 2008. If I do not finish it by the December meeting, I have to add $10 to the chapter's education fund. If I do finish, my name goes into a drawing for a $25 gift certificate to the LNS. Since I really want to finish all three of these this year, I really don't care which they pick, but their choice will probably see more dedicated stitching time in the next few months.

Playing Catch-up

Has it really been almost a week since I last posted? Apparently so.

I've been concentrating on two projects. The first was an exchange piece that made it out the door today on time (though I was up until 2AM last night finishing it, and still had to make cording this morning). I'll post photos of this next week after it is received. I can't wait to see what shows up in my mailbox for my first-ever exchange!

The second piece that has seen some attention lately is Winds of Color by Elsa Parrish. This line-drawn needlepoint project is stitched mostly in cotton floss on congress cloth. It was originally a teaching piece, published in 1991. I purchased it directly from Elsa about two years ago. At the time, she was selling kits on NeedleArtworks.com, and I must have ogled this piece for at least two years before I finally broke down and purchased it.Now that I've pulled it out again, I remember why I wanted it so much. It's going to be gorgeous when done. The right side of the picture will be bright colors, and the left all neutrals. The woman's dress will be stitched in shades of red. I would love to post a link to a stitched picture of this, but I cannot find anything on the web.

The class was obviously intended to be a study in various types of shading. In the green trees on the right, you can see hard lines of shading, but the gray trees were a more gradual shading. Some of the canvas areas are colored because this is supposed to show through the stitching to help shade it. Since I always want to learn something from each project to help me grow in my stitching, this is a great piece - beautiful and challenging!