Ruskin Garden Square Progress

Just a quick progress picture tonight, folks! Enjoy!

Breaking Up Repetitive Stitching

“Unity” is one of the basic principles of design. One way to achieve unity in a needlework design, particularly in a geometric design, is through the use of repetition.

Unfortunately for stitchers, repetition sometimes gets a bit, well, repetitive. Tedious. Boring. In my last post about Ruskin Garden Square, I mentioned that I have several of the smaller padded buttonhole squares to stitch. By the time I got halfway through the third such box, I decided I needed to break up the box stitching with other areas of the piece.

Fortunately, not all of the boxes will be used for cutwork. Two boxes in each corner provide a little space for a miniature “garden”. I decided to put these decorative stitches in along the way. Here’s the first corner after my mini gardens are in.

After getting those in, I was ready to get the boxes started on the next corner.

So, what do you do when the design you’re working on calls for several of the same design element? Do you push through and get them all done, or do you have a tendency to break up the stitching with other elements?

How Do You Manage Your Pattern While Stitching?

Many professional designers, especially those designing counted canvas work, offer a project’s instructions as just a set of loose pages. As far as I can tell, this is for a number of reasons:

• Good counted canvas instructions, particularly for complex designs, take a lot of pages. (Ruskin Garden Square, for example, has 70 pages of instructions, with at least one diagram on each page.)
• Stitchers will often have to refer to multiple pages simultaneously, and binding the instructions makes this cumbersome.
• Not everyone would agree on the best binding, anyway.

Since Ruskin Garden Square was originally a class project, Gay Ann separated the instructions into those pages that could be pre-class work from those that would be the focus of the class. When she sold the instructions to me, they came in a plain folder with the pre-class pages on the left, and in-class pages on the right.

I actually found that division of pages helpful to start, to get all of the various borders in, so I left the pages in the folder, and just pulled out one or two at a time as I needed them. But now I'm reaching the end of the borders, and I need to re-integrate those pages back into the main instruction set.

Juggling 15 or so loose pages of instructions (the pre-class work) is much easier than trying to shuffle 70 pages, though, so I’ve switched to my preferred method of managing instructions with loose pages. I prefer to use a three-ring binder with heavy-duty non-glare page protectors. I put two single-sided pages (back to back) into each page protector.

This is actually a fairly inexpensive setup. Over time, I’ve purchased a couple of boxes of 200 page protectors at my local warehouse club store (BJ’s in my case), along with a six-pack of 1/2” three ring binders. I prefer the kind with the clear pocket on the front so I can put the project’s picture there (though that’s not the type I first laid my hands on for these instructions, so the picture’s in the front inside pocket, as seen above). I’ll reuse the binder and page protectors for a future project after this one is finished. Theoretically, that should keep my WIP count fairly low, but I have a tendency to just buy more binders and page protectors. :-)

Here are the benefits I find to this setup:

• I can pull out a few pages at a time for reference (still in the page protectors).
• Since the protectors are non-glare, there’s no issue with my bright stitching light interfering with readability.
• The page protectors keep the instructions in great shape, and prevent me from losing individual pages.
• If I have to add notes to a page for some reason, I can just pull the paper out, make my notes in pencil, and reinsert it. The protector keeps the pencil from rubbing off, and I can always erase the note later if I want to give away or sell the instructions when I’m done.
• With the project picture on the front of the binder, it’s harder to grab the wrong instructions when I’m taking the project somewhere.

What about you? How do you organize instructions with large numbers of loose pages? I’m really happy with my setup as it is, but I’d love to hear if somebody has some way that might work better!

Preparing for a Ruskin Lace (or Reticello) Cutout

If you’ve ever done any Hardanger embroidery, you’re familiar with the idea that cutwork areas need to be “hemmed” with little blocks of satin stitches called kloster blocks. The preparation of a cutwork area for Ruskin lace or reticello is a bit similar, except that it is padded first and that buttonhole stitch is used as the hem.

The first step is to lay down a few long satin stitches along each side of the area that will be cut out. As in this block, there is often a row of four-sided stitches just outside of the square.

On top of those stitches, add a round of buttonhole (or, if you’re being a stickler, closed blanket stitch), with the loop side of the stitches on the inside of the cutwork area.

Then you can fill in the corners with a few straight stitches just to pretty it up a bit.

That’s all there is to getting an area ready for cutting in Ruskin lace and reticello. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got another 11 little boxes to stitch!

Four-Sided Stitches Complete!

At last. Here’s the reason why my last few posts have been a bit skimpy (as this one will be!). I’ve been plugging away at four-sided stitches on Ruskin Garden Square from Gay Ann Rogers for the better part of a week. Who knew that such a simple stitch could take up so much time? But it’s done now.

Next up on this project is to do a bunch of borders for areas that will eventually be cut out.

On a recent post about my completed Reticello 1 project, Wendy commented that she is “not completely sure what [reticello] is.” I’ll try to clear that up a bit, Wendy, as I go through the process here. From the little bit I’ve read on reticello and Ruskin lace, there are only a few differences. I’ll go over what I’ve learned about those differences as I stitch the various areas in this project.

Stay tuned!

The Pros and Cons of Basting a Design

If you do a lot of counted canvaswork, sometimes it seems as if every other pattern you pick up calls for some sort of basting lines to be put in before you start stitching the actual design.

My confession: For the vast majority of these, I completely ignore the instructions to baste.

Why? Well, for one, I’m often too impatient to get started to bother with that step. But the other major reason I don’t baste is because the counting of many patterns really isn’t that complicated. If I’m building a geometric design from the inside out, for example, I don’t need to baste the areas of every border. I can just count out 10 or 20 threads or so (depending on the pattern, obviously) to start the next border. For me, there’s little benefit of spending the time to baste in this case.

Everybody’s different of course. I have some friends who swear by basting and would rather not have to deal with counting each step. If that works for you, go for it.

On the other hand, sometimes a design is made a great deal easier by simply adding a few quick basting lines. Here is the beginning of the borders for Ruskin Garden Square by Gay Ann Rogers.

As you can see, for this design I chose to add the basting lines, which consisted only of marking the horizonal and vertical centerlines, and diagonal lines going out from the center. The reason is that each side of each border starts as a couched thread going from one corner of the border to another. If I didn’t have those diagonals in there, it would have meant double, triple, quadruple counting to find where each couched line starts and stops. When the distance between the outer couched line and the middle couched line is 40 threads, that’s a lot of counting. And a lot of room for mistakes.

With the basted diagonals, though, I just had to count the forty intersections out one corner to start the first side. Then I simply laid the thread straight across to the next diagonal corner. That easily, I know I have a straight line and where it’s supposed to end. No counting all over again at the second corner.

So I guess it comes down to a cost-benefit analysis. If the cost of basting (the time and complexity of the it) is greater than the benefit to be gained (the saving of time when it comes to stitching the actual design), then I don’t baste. If I’m going to save a lot of time in stitching by putting in a few simple basting lines, then I’ll do it.

What about you? Do you put in all basting lines according to instructions, or are you more of a “let’s wing it” stitcher?

Upcoming: A Bit of Ruskin Lace

Every year, Gay Ann Rogers holds a week-long sale of some of her patterns. Some are from her years of teaching, and this year, some were brand new. Gay Ann’s “E-Week” (as she calls it) was just a few short weeks ago. And despite the fact that I have many, many, many of her designs in my stash, I did feel the pull to purchase a couple more.

While I was combing through my stash to make sure I didn’t re-purchase something I already had, I decided that if I was going to order any more of her patterns, I should probably actually stitch some of those already in the stash.

I had two requirements for starting one:

• It had to be relatively small (with the assumption being that small would be faster)
• I didn’t want to spend a lot of money to get going (especially since I would be purchasing additional projects anyway. Fortunately, I had several already kitted up.

The one I decided on fits both criteria. It’s only about 8-1/2 inches square on congress cloth, and I had the kit.

Unfortunately, I don’t know if in this case small equals faster. Because I apparently didn’t choose something easy. This project is a study in ruskin lace, in which areas of the canvas are completely removed so the stitcher can add threads back in those areas and stitch on the added threads.

Here is Gay Ann’s Ruskin Garden Square:

It’s unfortunately not a terrific photo, since it’s printed on regular copy paper and seems to be a bit washed out.

Time will tell if this doesn’t take as long as I think it might. Stay tuned!