Bound Cross, Six Trip Herringbone, Shading

Last night I tried two new stitches and played around with shading a bit more.

First, I tried a Six Trip Herringbone using 4 strands of floss in five shades. It started out okay, but I actually abandoned after two trips. First, I didn't pay attention to the stitching diagram closely enough and did not realize that there really wasn't much backing for burying the thread ends. I may end up ripping it out of the sampler (although I'd rather not) because it's just not secure at the moment.

The other problem I had was tension. The stitches are so long that it's easy for them to slip and slide and come loose even while still stitching. I tried to correct this mid-course without much luck. I probably need additional practice. I think this stitch might work better with a "sticky" fiber like wool rather than cotton or silk. The stickiness would help the stitch stay put to the canvas and to the other stitches over it. I'm not sure, I don't have any wool at the moment to experiment with (unless I raid the sock yarn stash).

The second stitch I tried was the Bound Cross. It's a nice fat stitch -- I did with 4 strands of floss but I bet one could get away with less. Its fatness on 4 strands is somewhat nice though, If you were doing a pattern of squares where you want to go from flat to fat, it would work well being included.

In this section of Bound Cross, I also experimented with stranded shading as described in "The Needlepoint Book." I started with a row of four Bound Crosses in a dark maroon. I did three more rows of four stitches, each row had a strand of dark maroon replaced with a lighter maroon, so that by row four it was 3 strands lighter maroon and 1 strand dark maroon. I was skeptical at first that the shading would actually be visible, but it really was -- a very nice effect, both close up and at a distance. I can see that this type of shading really requires effective use of the laying tool. Although I am getting the hang of it, the shading suffers if you cut corners and don't spend that extra second laying things flat.