Some Whitework in the Works

Stitching bloggers all over seem to be owning up to the number of works in progress they have. I guess I’m looking at joining the bandwagon. I’m not quite ready to put up a full list, but I would like to share a couple of whitework projects I started over the past year but haven’t yet blogged about.

The first is an EGA group correspondence course by Jane-Ellen Balzuweit called Dresden Garden.

Yes, that’s a plain old American quarter there for scale.  The full size of the project is only about 4 inches wide by 3 inches tall. This piece is a study of Dresden lace which is a combination of surface embroidery, pulled thread, and shadow work (as seen in the white swirls). It’s stitched on Legacy shadow work linen, which is approximately 48 count.  I’m guessing that’s what led to this remaining unfinished. The rest of the stitching is counted and primarily pulled. That requires a bit too much concentration for me right now!

The second piece of whitework is also an EGA group correspondence course in another German embroidery technique, Schwalm embroidery in this case. It is Barbara Kershaw’s Liesel, and as you can see, I’ve barely begun. I’m a bit discouraged about the wobbliness of my initial lines of coral knots, but I really would like to get this moving a bit, since I’ve always wanted to learn the basics of Schwalm embroidery.

This project is a bit bigger than the other, maybe about 8 inches by 12 inches. It’s on a slightly uneven-weave linen (32ct by 36ct, maybe?) that I had in my stash, so it was pretty easy on the budget!

As you can see, I haven’t completely abandoned my interest in a wide variety of needlework techniques. It’s still always fun to learn something new. What new (to you) techniques have you been exploring lately?

Whitecaps on the Waves

Thanks for the compliments on the start of the center medallion on Ocean Waves. I definitely felt more comfortable by the last section of gold than I did when starting out!

And I’m really glad that designer Judy Souliotis recommended starting with the lower portion of the waves, because the whitecaps were doubly challenging.

For these, the first several rows of couching only went around the upper portion of the whitecaps. The tips of the waves needed to be filled in completely when another row of couched threads wouldn’t be able to fit. (Click on the picture to enlarge, and it should make sense!)

After the first several rows, the couched thread started spiraling in to the center.

A similar process was used on the left side of the waves. (This picture was unfortunately taken with the flash on, so there’s a bit more glare.)

One more post, and the finished Ocean Waves will be revealed. Stay tuned!

Japanese Couching: Starting the Center Waves

The center motif on Ocean Waves is stitched using a couching technique traditionally found in Japanese Embroidery. This is the first time I’ve ever tried it, though. The technique involves couching two strands of metallic (typically Japanese gold or silver) with a silk thread called couching silk (of course).

Here’s the first section stitched in this manner. (You can click on the photo for a closer look.) The couching was started at the far left end of the area. I couched along the bottom edge of the area, made a sharp turn at the far right, and couched along the top edge of the area. The area is filled in by spiraling in to the center. The couching stitches on each row are staggered from the couching stitches on the previous row.

The trickiest part of this technique, I found, was turning the sharp corners. I have a couple of books which explain this well, and Jane Zimmerman has posted a very complete description online, also. Unfortunately, I didn’t capture step-by-step photos of the process.

In Jane Zimmerman’s article, she mentions that the couching stitches have to be exactly the correct length, so the couched thread can’t slide around and isn’t pinched. This is a disadvantage of trying this technique on congress cloth. I was generally able to pierce the cloth threads at least once with each stitch, but it’s next to impossible to get those stitches a precise length with this ground fabric. Maybe someday I’ll try it on the silk fabric typically used for “real” Japanese embroidery and the results will be a bit more precise.

Anyway, moving on. This first section of the waves was in a red-gold Japanese metallic. This was followed by an area of Japanese gold metallic, then a section in Kreinik #4 braid, and then two more sections in the Japanese red-gold and gold.

Up next – the silver froth of the waves. But that’s another post!

Planning a path in hardanger

When stitching filling stitches in hardanger embroidery, it’s very helpful to think through the order of stitching, or the path you’re going to take.

I’ll walk through how I stitched the second end of my pastel hardanger piece (after I learned a few things with the first!).

The first step is to cut out the appropriate threads. But wait. In case you’re unfamiliar with hardanger, take a look at the little blocks of 5 stitches. These are called kloster blocks. They act as a fabric hem so the threads next to the blocks can be cut.

The result is a mesh where, both horizontally and vertically, you’ve got four threads intact, then a space where four threads were removed.

Knowing that I’ve got to work the divided branches on to center wrapped bars (which you’ll see below), I decided to do those wrapped bars first.

Looking back at my chart for this area (option 3 in the link), you’ll see that it calls for two wrapped bars side by side down the center. In the photo above, I’ve worked from the right side to the left, wrapping one side of these side-by-side wrapped bars, and I’ve started stitching back to the right, working the second of each pair. (Does this make sense?)

After finishing the side-by-side wrapped bars, I’m back on the right (seen above), and need to start needleweaving the outside sets of threads. As I work to the left, I’m putting in the divided branches where they’re needed. In the photo below, you can see how these wrap over the wrapped bars and distort them.

In the very center, I did a different type of divided branch, where two points are anchored in fabric, and the other is over a wrapped bar. I’m sure somebody else has done this, but I don’t recall seeing it in any books.

Reaching the left side again, I’m traveling to the other bars that need weaving by slipping under the kloster blocks on the reverse side of the piece. Then I’m working back to the right.

Upon reaching the center of this path, there’s a bit of a snag. I need to stitch side-by-side wrapped bars again. Unfortunately, there’s no help for it.

I decide to stitch the lower one first, putting in the dove’s eye, then I need to somehow stitch the other wrapped bar. I did this slightly differently on each end. If I did it again, I’d repeat this method: I kept stitching the rest of the path, then went back to wrap that last bar at the end, burying the thread in the neighboring needleweaving. Anybody have a better idea?

Only a little bit left to do before the stitching is complete on this!

Friday Finish: My first Hardanger

In the spirit of the Hardanger piece I'm working on now, I present the very first Hardanger design I ever stitched.

Design: a runner made from doubling the bellpull design from Cross 'N Patch's Charity Sampler booklet

Designer: Emie Bishop

Technique: Hardanger and cross stitch

Ground fabric: 32ct evenweave (jobelan, maybe?)

Threads: pearl cotton and floss

Stitches used: cross stitch, kloster blocks, buttonhole, lacy edge, bullions, dove's eyes, spider webs, other filling stitches

Stitching timeframe: Finished in 1996. I'm guessing I worked on and off on this for a year, given that I was in college at the time.

This was my first Hardanger piece, as I mentioned above. It is a prime example of the attitude of "It's just string." Or it could have been simple ignorance. Take your pick.

• I didn’t think it was a big deal to essentially stitch the bellpull (which consisted of two of the diamond repeats and the heart at the bottom) twice.
• I didn't know lacy edge and bullions were supposed to be difficult.
• I do recall vigilantly checking the alignment of my kloster blocks before cutting any threads, but I don't really remember any anxiety about cutting the threads once I knew everything lined up.

In hindsight, it’s easy to see that I should have practiced bullion knots on a doodle cloth before putting them on the real piece. In this picture, you can see the little squares made up of bullion knots on the right, where I started, and those on the left, where I finished after going all the way around the piece. There is a very distinct difference in tension!

I don’t really recall having much difficulty with the lacy edge, but to this day, I haven’t used this stitch on any other piece.

Here’s a close up of one of the ends of the design.

I should find a place to display this rather than keeping it in my cedar chest. Maybe a high shelf where little fingers can’t reach.

Hardanger: Option 3 Before and After

Last week I posted three options for the end area of my pastel hardanger design. The responses from readers overwhelmingly agreed that option 3 was the way to go.

So, what does option 3 look like, once it’s stitched? The photo below gives a good idea of the “before” and the “after.”

The picture of the entire piece shows how this decision works with the rest of the design.

I think all of you were right. This option really does compliment and balance the open areas near the center.

Friday Finish: Casalguidi and Lavender

Only I would propose a new series of going through past (and some current) finishes, post only two weeks on that series, and then neglect it for another two weeks. There’s no excuse, but here’s my attempt to resurrect the plan.

Here’s one that’s been done for quite a while.

Design: Casalguidi and Lavender (a retired EGA correspondence course)

Designer: Barbara Kershaw

Technique: Casalguidi (of course!)

Ground fabric: 28(?) ct linen

Threads: pearl cotton

Stitches used: Casalguidi stitch, italian four sided, detached buttonhole, needleweaving, and some neat wrapped stitch that looks like a REALLY long bullion knot (but I didn’t look up what it’s called)

Stitching timeframe: I don’t know. Finished sometime in 2006, I think.

Casalguidi is often stitched white on white or ecru on ecru, but the book Casalguidi Style Linen Embroidery by Effie Mitrofanis (now MUCH more expensive than when I purchased it) shows some antique pieces that are white or ecru on pink or light blue. These inspired me to use some pinkish linen in my stash with ecru threads.

Does the stitch used in the heavy diagonal bar in the middle of the piece look familiar? It’s the Casalguidi stitch, which I used as Santa’s walking stick on Celebration Santa.

Friday Finish: Plum Blossoms

Yes, you read that right. It’s really done! Endless background and all!

Design: Plum Blossoms (an EGA correspondence course)

Designer: Margaret Kinsey

Technique: Rozashi

Ground fabric: Ro (a Japanese fabric)

Threads: silk, metallic, and silk/metallic combo

Stitches used: All vertical stitches (which is the nature of Rozashi)

Stitching timeframe: I have no idea when this was started. I posted about it being in progress back in December 2007, so I’m guessing maybe 2005? Finished Wednesday, June 9, 2010. Pathetic.

But it’s done in time to send it in for evaluation! Hooray!

Almost ready to give up

I have been stitching for at least an hour each night on the background of my Rozashi piece, Plum Blossoms.

Wait. Let me back up. I originally took this course through either my local EGA chapter or through the CyberStitchers chapter a few years ago. This year, CyberStitchers decided to offer it again, so I re-registered, thinking that might give me the motivation to finish it and send it in for evaluation.

Being that CyberStitchers has members all over the world, managing correspondence courses is a little more troublesome than in a face-to-face chapter. A coordinator is assigned for each course, just like in a “normal” chapter. That coordinator is the main contact between the teacher and the chapter. The difference is that in a normal chapter, the interactions between members and the coordinator can happen in person. Not so with a cyber chapter. All of those interactions (distributing kits and instructions, collecting finished pieces, and redistributing pieces back from evaluation) have to be accomplished via mail. The mailing times (student to coordinator, coordinator to teacher) have to be considered.

So, when does my Plum Blossoms have to be done, you ask? Umm… well… it’s due to the teacher (Margaret Kinsey) by the end of the month. Yes, this month. June. Which means that the coordinator wants them by June 15. As in 10 days from now. Which means I’ve got less than a week to get my butt in gear and finish this thing.

Then again, maybe I don’t. As one of my stitchy friends pointed out, I could just send it in incomplete, since there’s more than enough finished for evaluation of each technique.

But I know myself. If I don’t get it done now, using this deadline as motivation, it will likely come back from the evaluation and go back into the WIP pile, maybe seeing the light of day again in a year. Or more. And it will still look like it does now.

 

That said, I’m really sick of it. Maybe I’m supposed to be getting into some zen place or something with the repetition, but all I know is that I keep stitching and stitching and not seeing much progress. Does anybody enjoy stitching background like this? Why? Can you give me hints as to how to approach it so that it doesn’t seem like a chore?

Of course, I’m not at all sorry I decided to try Rozashi. As I’ve said before, I believe that everything you do with needle and thread improves everything else you do with needle and thread. I encourage anyone who’s at all curious about various ethnic techniques to try it. I just hope you’re able to find more enjoyment in stitching background than I am. :-)

Gotta go. I have background to stitch.

Unending background on Plum Blossoms

Unfortunately, stitching away on never-ending background doesn't make for decent blog content. Fortunately, I am making progress on Plum Blossoms.

(Oh, and thanks go to Susan for the hint on making my Japanese needle cease squeaking. I didn't have any fine sandpaper, but an emery board worked in a pinch. I made sure the needle kept spinning so it didn't get any flat edges. Thanks, Susan!)

In the past week, PB has gone from this:

To this:

While I'm very glad to be making progress on this, I need to break up the monotony a bit. I may pull out one of my other 4 goal pieces to get a little bit of variety in. Anybody want to vote for which one?

Using Casalguidi Stitch for Santa's Walking Stick

Over the past few weeks, I've made a bit more progress on Celebration Santa (canvas and stitch guide from Joan Thomasson).

When I started this project, I wasn't sure how I was going to stitch his walking stick. In Joan's original, she stitched over the brown for the stick and attached a real twig, then stitched Santa's fingers over it. This wasn't a look I was going for. Besides, it just seemed so... um... dirty to attach a twig to my canvas. Never mind I have no idea how that would hold up over time. I'm not stitching this to be an heirloom, but I would like it to last for several years, at least!

Instead, I opted to use the Casalguidi stitch, which is sometimes referred to as raised stem stitch. As the name implies, this stitch is traditionally used in Casalguidi embroidery from a little town in Italy called--you guessed it--Casalguidi! Unfortunately, I neglected to take specific step-by-step pictures, but this site shows the progression of the stitch.

For Santa's stick, I used brown DMC floss for the padding and base stitches, then switched to a variegated 6-strand floss for the stem stitches. I chose to use all six strands, not separating the threads before stitching. This is supposed to look like a stick, after all, and it shouldn't be completely smooth.

I was pleasantly surprised at the result.

This is a prime example of why I try all sorts of stitching techniques. I actually learned Casalguidi stitch in an EGA correspondence course for the traditional technique, and was thrilled to find an additional use for it!

How about you? Have you found new ways to use old techniques?

Up close and personal with parts of the Plimoth Jacket project

*** Update: Tricia finally posted about this presentation, and I was surprised to see my own face in her post. I'm the one with the glasses on top of my head! ***

This past Tuesday, March 9, the exhibition of the Plimoth Jacket opened at Winterthur Museum. This past Friday, Tricia Wilson Nguyen visited RIT (my alma mater) to give a lecture about the project. I had the very great pleasure of attending the lecture.

There were three parts to Tricia's presentation. The first part was an overview of what it took to create the ensemble (jacket, coif, and forehead cloth). This included the recreation of several threads (such as Gilt Sylke Twist) and the participation of nearly 300 people - stitchers, spanglers, lacemakers, and textile manufacturers. The embroidery and assembly took 3700 hours to complete!

Next was a discussion of how the data gathered from this project has helped reinterpret how embroidered garments were made in the past. Historians have often assumed that a jacket such as this was the work of only one person. While experienced embroiderers can often look at samples of stitching and quickly discern the differences in tension resulting from various hands, Tricia has actually devised a way to mathematically prove this.

It's accomplished by analyzing the stitch regularity (any extra or missed stitches, as well as tension inconsistencies) and frequency (stitch size) of patches of detached buttonhole. It turns out that detached buttonhole can be mathematically analyzed in ways similar to nanocrystalline structures! The result is that while a patch of stitches isn't distinctive enough to pinpoint exactly who stitched it, we can certainly identify various levels of stitching experience.

The benefit is that existing examples of embroidery from the seventeenth century can now be analyzed to determine approximately how many hands were involved. Tricia warns that it's not exact, but that we can definitively say things like "at least 6 different people worked on this".  There's a lot more work left to do to analyze all of the detached buttonhole patches on the jacket ensemble (through close-up photographs) to see what else can be discovered about the past.

The last part of the presentation was perhaps of less interest to the stitchers in the audience, but was fascinating to the technical folks. (Being an engineer and stitcher, I appreciated the whole thing!) Tricia talked about her other business, Fabric Works, which is a consulting firm specializing in electronic textiles. The really neat thing is that Tricia actually uses traditional needlework techniques to prototype some of these e-textiles. For example, because production braiding machines waste so much material simply to get the machines threaded and ready to make braid and because the materials being used are very expensive, she used traditional Japanese braiding techniques for kumihimo to make prototype lengths of braid. In other instances, she's used the Japanese embroidery method of hand-twisting threads to create prototype threads that contain metal. Only somebody with thorough knowledge of traditional textile methods as well as a scientific background could manage this!

While I really enjoyed the presentation, perhaps the best part of the evening was at the end. Remember how I said that the jacket project also involved a forehead cloth and coif? Well, right now only the jacket is on display at Winterthur. The other pieces are still in Tricia's possession. Hooray! Yes, I had the opportunity to examine them without a piece of glass getting in the way. They truly are works of art.

Unfortunately, I neglected to bring my "real" camera, and had to make do with my cell phone. Here's the coif:

A close-up of a bird on the coif. To get an idea of the scale of this, the bird is about 2-1/2 inches long.

The forehead cloth:

I admit these pictures aren't the best. Here's a much better picture of the forehead cloth on Tricia's site.

Thanks again, Tricia, for a thoroughly enjoyable evening!

WIP: Blue Hardanger (original)

Hooray! It's November 30! I made it through NaBloPoMo, though it was a close call with a late post yesterday. Time for one last featured WIP. It is another original design that I refer to as the Blue Hardanger.

Technique/Materials:  Hardanger on 25ct lugana.  The kloster blocks and buttonhole are stitched in Caron's Watercolours.  The rest of the stitching is in pearl cotton.

Background:  I think I started this around 8 years ago. Unlike the pastel hardanger, I started working this one from the inside out. I figured out the octagon shape, then created a nine-patch of octagons, figuring out the outside border after that.

Why it's not done:  I really hate sounding like a broke record, so you can fill in the blanks. Worked in-hand, nerve problems, yada yada.

What's left to do:  The remaining buttonhole around the outside, and all of the filling stitches, both the dove's eyes and needleweaving inside the octagon shapes and the larger blocks that will allow for fancier stitches.

WIP: Ukrainian Openwork Sampler (elements by Jan Walters)

Today's featured WIP is a sampler in Ukrainian Openwork. The individual bands were all designed by Jan Walters, but the arrangement of bands is my own.

Technique/Materials:  Ukrainian Openwork (primarily consisting of satin stitches and drawn and pulled thread work) in DMC coton a broder threads on 25ct Pearl Linen (which is a polyester/linen blend).

Background:  I took the EGA correspondence course in Ukrainian Openwork with the CyberStitchers chapter in 2004. For my critique, I stitched a table runner, but I could only put one main band design on that runner. I really wanted to try the other larger bands, so I decided to start a sampler of them.

Why it's not done:  I have no idea what made this project land in the "someday" box, since this was pre-blog and I didn't keep any records of my progress (or lack thereof) at that time. I assume I was just tired of stitching white and went on to something else that caught my eye.

What's left to do:  I'm not really sure. It's been so long since I looked at the course text, I couldn't tell you what bands I planned to do, although the picture roughly shows the entire design area (assuming an equal fabric margin on all sides of the design).

WIP: Armenian lace doily edging (by Elena Dickson)

Today's featured WIP is a bit of a departure. It is the edging on a doily, using the techniques and a design found in the book Knotted Lace in the Eastern Mediterranean Tradition by Elena Dickson. **Update: Since the Amazon price is so high, I went looking for an alternate source, in case anybody was interested in this book. Abe Books has links to several booksellers with much lower prices.**

Technique/Materials:  This edging consists of loops of thread in between knots, worked around and around the pre-made doily. The design develops in the spacing of the knots into the previous rows.  The thread is DMC Cordonnet.

Background:  I really don't recall when I started this. My edition of the book was published in 1999, so it was sometime in the past ten years. This is another travel project.

Why it's not done:  It's really pretty, but doing row upon row of knots gets a little tedious. Never mind that it is "in hand" work, with all of the issues I've got with it.

What's left to do:  Lots more knots. Here's what the completed edging is supposed to look like.

Maybe it'll happen sometime in the next ten years.