Weekend Activities: Shading and a Kit

This weekend I spent a serious amount of time with needlepoint. I was only interrupted by a holiday outing to see a play, which was fun so I didn't complain.

I tried out some shading between two different color families. Using the Bound Cross stitch with 4 strands of floss, I tried shading downwards within a family and across between families. The colors were the purple family and the blue family. It didn't have a good start, the shading between the families look distinctly jarring. However, I persevered and I found that over a number of stitches with very gradual shading, the effect actually became pleasing. I think that the relationship between the specific colors chosen in each family is absolutely critical, however.

I did that particular exercise on my sampler. On Saturday I set that aside in favor of trying out the kit I bought a few weeks ago. I had purchased a Bucilla kit showing a house with garden. I am not particularly fond of the design, but it seemed to have enough going on that it would be a challenge and a learning experience. I am not sure how to categorize it, so I'll simply say that it is an art project worked with needle and thread on some sort of textile ground.

We picked up appropriately sized stretcher bars at Michael's, plus a staple gun which I did not previously have. My companion (a man) insisted that tacks would be too hard to push into the wood and the stapling with a staple gun is much more satisfying. I think these things are true. I had a little trouble getting the hang of the staple gun, but now that I've stapled my carpet to.. itself (accidentally) and successfully mounted the kit's textile on the stretcher bars, I think I've got confidence with it.

The next thing I did was divide up the fibers by type (floss, wool) and by color family. Some colors were quite difficult -- what's the difference between grey and dusty grey? Is pale yellow actually a cream color? But I got it done by process of elimination and guessing.

Finally, I got started. I started in the upper left (not heeding my own previous advice to start in the upper right since I'm left handed). The work involved a number of new stitches:

Satin stitch -- has gone off like a charm. I like this stitch a lot and it is very easy to do if you are just staying in the lines.

Split stitch -- I had a lot more trouble with this one. My problem is that when I bring the needle back through the canvas and split the previous stitch, that previous stitch actually becomes loose. There doesn't seem to be a way that I could manage to retighten this stitch once it is split and the new stitch is being worked. Not all of the stitches turned out this way so it might be practice.

French knot -- Again, I had some trouble with this one, which is a shame because it is used in every flower on the canvas, it seems like. I think I need to practice this a little bit on my sampler and also look at a couple of different sites with diagrams or descriptions to see if a little variation in the instructions will help me find a way to make it work.

The design is machine-stamped so following the lines is sometimes a bit of guesswork. I also think the person who did the stitchery for the enclosed completed photograph cheated and used wool for a lantern instead of floss as the instructions specified -- as the photo shows a much larger and fuzzier lantern post than what I ended up with for floss.

Design Idea: Shading Study

While I was working my Bound Crosses and shading them, I thought that it might be interesting to do a full piece focusing on shading. The effect of shading by varying strand color is fascinating, and quite effective. My idea involves using very few stitch types, but instead focusing on color variation.

The top would be black all the way across the top, with columns going down that gradate in color to white. The arrangement across the canvas would be ROY G BIV, with a grey gradation bracketing it on either side. The trickiness would be in shading between the color families. For instance, the Red -> Orange border. I think you could do complicated shading like this, even with 4 strands, by slowly substituting the new color family into the strands of the previous. With 4 strands, you don't have much to work with, but if you pay attention to the directional flows (up, down, left, right) you could choose adequate combinations. The effect would be a very large gradual blend in any direction.

The result, of course, would be tiny stitch areas for each color combination. The design would have to accommodate all those switchovers by:

• Choosing stitches with adequate backing to bury both ends of the thread
• Have enough stitches to deal with the burial of threads, and prevent insanity. Can you imagine rethreading the needle for one or two stitches over and over? That would be bad.
  

Currently I am thinking that the stitches need to vary between the columns and the cross-column blendings -- a relatively flat stitch versus a "textured" or fat stitch. For example, Cashmere or Mosaic versus Bound Cross.

This weekend I will probably try some tri-color and quad-color shading as described above on my sampler, basically extending my current Bound Cross area. I'll also try Bound Cross with Mosaic or Cashmere to see how they look in relation to each other.

While looking around the web at shading information in needlepoint, I encountered Sphere on a Table, a shading study done by a beginning needlepointer using only black and white thread. His accompanying information says it took a very long time to finish and has numerous beginner's mistakes, but wow, what a labor. That takes nerves of steel.

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.