Words in needlework

Posted on 24th January, 2012 by Flights of Fancy

Hardanger doesn’t lend itself very easily to lettering. Letters and numbers can be created (as I did in A-B-C and 1-2-3) and are fine for birthday cards or personalised needlecases or the like, but I wouldn’t like to stitch a whole quotation in them – it would soon become a banner!
And yet words – quotations, names, sayings – seem to go very well with stitching. Just think of all those samplers that nimble-fingered stitchers have created over the centuries; they very often have some lettering in them, either as an alphabet or as verse or saying, or even just to sign the sampler.
A large proportion of those samplers are done in cross stitch, and that seems to present an instant solution to the problem of words in Hardanger: simply add them in a different technique! Use Hardanger for whatever pictorial or abstract design you have in mind, and use cross stitch for the letters. And that is what I’ve done in a growing number of designs – usually "over one", so that the crosses are nice and small and you can get a fair bit of text in.
When designing anything with words, there is always the question whether the words themselves are enough, or whether they need to be decorated or even illustrated. There are many examples of "samplers" which are really not much more than a saying or quotation, sometimes with perhaps a simple border around them. "Home Sweet Home", "Life Begins at 40", or something a bit more shocking if you’re into subversive cross stitch – they don’t really need a lot of illustration. My Big Toe designs are a good example. Then there are the designs which have the words and some small stitched motifs or embellishments to enhance them; Lizzie*Kate designs often fall into this category. Some designs are about half and half, with illustration and text equal partners (like some of Little House Needleworks designs). And finally there are designs where the words act almost like a caption or comment to the main design.
So where do Mabel’s designs fit in? Well, they fit into several categories, really. "Housework is a waste of good stitching time" (which comes with a bonus saying, "A stitch in time saves my sanity") will be one of those text-with-border samplers which are great to stitch with lovely variegated threads. But although the border is not an illustration, it does enhance the words – the lovely cutwork border shows that the stitcher would much rather attend to her needlework than to the washing up or hoovering!
Housework sampler
In some designs, the Hardanger illustrates the words. This is often the case in my religious designs, where a cross (sometimes together with other symbols) shows the beliefs that underpin the words. Twice these words are "Faith, Hope, Love"; in the bookmark of that name, and in Corinth. The other is the quotation from St Francis of Assisi, where the motifs actually echo the words in two ways: the Hardanger cross refers to the Gospel, and the capital in Assisi work refers to St Francis!

A design where the words are like a comment on the Hardanger, while the Hardanger adds body to the words, is Very Berry – the words evoke thoughts of prepared dishes and drinks, and the rich hand-dyed threads and sparkling beads give colour to those images.

And are there any designs where the words and the picture are equal partners? Well, I’m stitching one at the moment. The words "I’ve caught the Stitching Bug" will sound familiar to any avid stitcher – and what nicer "bug" to illustrate it than the ladybird (or ladybug to American stitchers)! To make it a cheerful design that evokes a summer’s day when it would be lovely to sit in the garden and work on your latest project, I’ve chosen to stitch the words in yellow (for the sun), blue (for the sky), and green (for the grass). In silks, because I happened to have in my stash some gorgeous Chameleon silks which insisted that they should be used. But it works in DMC stranded cottons as well. And just to whet your appetites, here’s a sneak preview (click on it for a larger image):

Second thoughts on designs

Posted on 20th January, 2012 by Flights of Fancy

Carousel got a rather more drastic make-over than most, but a little change here and there is not unusual. Quite often, these happen as I am stitching the designs for the first time. For example, it may suddenly become very clear that my original choice of colours looks washed out or faded, or on the contrary that it looks garish; in one case I realised as I was getting the threads together that I had charted the design using a non-existent shade of DMC perle #8! Often this can be resolved quite easily. Because I was aiming for a "medieval" sort of look Canterbury started out with a much darker blue and green, but as the golden yellow framework grew I realised that in their surroundings they would look almost black, rather than the jewel-like and bright shades I was looking for. So off to my thread box to see if there were any brighter shades that would fit in – and fortunately there were so that I didn’t have to order anything in but could continue stitching right away.
Canterbury
Sometimes changes are suggested by threads or fabrics I acquire after a design has already been charted for other materials. Frozen Flower was originally meant to be stitched on white using white and two shades of grey or blue – and I’ll probably still stitch one of them in that colour scheme. But then I got some lovely dark hand-dyed fabric from Sparklies (a shade called Ink) and realised it would look really interesting in white and ice blue on that dark, stormy background. In cases like these, both variations will be included in the chart pack, so that every stitcher can decide for herself which she would prefer.
Occasionally I will find as I am stitching that I have charted something on paper which is simply impossible to do on fabric. The central motif in Sunken Treasures originally had stitches in perle #5 over one fabric thread where purple, blue and green meet, and it simply became one blobby mess. Back to the drawing board, making sure the smallest stitches went over two fabric threads, and the crisis was resolved. A smaller crisis in the same design involved some multi-coloured squares I had originally placed in the corners of the central motif, at the base of the "seaweed" shapes. They were possible, but they looked wrong. Getting three colours into such a small square made it difficult to keep them neat, and in spite of the colours (the same as the seaweed) they simply didn’t gel with the rest of the design. So eventually they got transformed into an additional light green leaf for the seaweed, and all was well.

And of course sometimes designs get changed simply because I can! The piece I’m stitching at the moment was designed while I was listening a lot to The Corries, and one song that really stuck in my mind begins "Green is Flodgarry, blue is the sea". The design was quite abstract so I decided that Flodgarry was as good a name as any, and that I’d keep it in shades of blue and green. Which was fortunate as I had just bought the most marvellous deep blue green fabric from Sparklies, which went perfectly with one of my favourite Caron shades. But Flodgarry consists of two designs, and I wanted to ring the changes, so for the other one I chose the very bright turquoise/navy/green Caron thread which I had used in one of my A-B-C models. It seemed a good choice. It would look nice and startling on bright white fabric. And so as I got the materials together to start stitching it, I picked antique white fabric, and the much more muted Caron shade I used in Percival.
Oh well. They do say woman is fickle …

A revamp for Carousel

Posted on 17th January, 2012 by Flights of Fancy

Some designs take a long time to get exactly right. Mind you, I sometimes doubt any design is ever "exactly right" – but most of them fortunately do get to a point where I can say "I’m happy with that" (or even, occasionally, "very happy"!)
How it works for other designers I don’t know, but I find that for me most budding ideas either work or not fairly quickly. In my mind I’ll have a shape, or a colour, or a theme, or even a particular stitch I want to use, and then I’ll sketch a bit, and try out some things on the computer, and generally it becomes clear pretty soon whether or not it’s going to come to anything. There are several files in my Mabel folder consisting of ideas which simply didn’t live up to what I saw in my mind. Being by nature a relatively optimistic soul I keep them in the hope that one day they’ll get transformed into something usable.
There are others which take shape, and almost from the start I feel that they do actually look the way I envisaged them (Frosty Pine and Very Berry spring to mind). It’s very exciting when that happens! Fortunately this is how most of the designs that eventually end up on the website are created.
And then there are the ones which get charted, and I’m happy with them, but in the back of my mind there is a small but unmistakable niggle that they are not quite what I had intended. It’s often hard to put my finger on it. It may be a feeling that the shape is not exactly right. Or that it ought to have a certain something more. Or less. Or different. In those cases, I tend to put them on the Planned page, but they get moved to the back of the queue; there are generally plenty of designs I can stitch before I get to the "might-be-room-for-improvement" ones, and it gives me a chance to have another look at them in a few months’ time.
This is what happened to Carousel. I designed it last September, and it started with a particular combination of stitches I wanted to use. In one of the Round Dozen designs there are four Y-bars (my own invention, as far as I know) around a central square, and they have rather a pleasing lop-sided look:
Y bars
I wanted to use that combination again, in a design which would be a bit swirly, and suggest circular movement. It was at that point that I came up with the name Carousel (it was a toss up between that and Merry-Go-Round). The starting point was easy – the Y-bars. Then I thought spider’s web fillings would add to the circular theme, and beads for the decorated fairground feeling. So far so good, and I put all these things together in a design charted in two colours (a greeny blue, though I wasn’t sure yet that those would be the eventual colours). It looked like this:
Y bars
I had some vague idea that the cross shape and the 8 diamonds around it would look a bit like a merry-go-round viewed from above, but it didn’t look quite right; so it got put towards the end of the Planned queue and I thought of it no more. Then (I wrote about this earlier) I found some interesting new stitches in a second-hand book; well, old stitches really, of course, but new to me. They were crying out for a design, but try as I might I couldn’t get them to work together – or even to work separately. Then one day I looked at Carousel and realised that the Maltese interlacing stitch was quite swirly, and might go well with it. And the satin stitch braid looked rather like the sort of decorative band you might find around the top of a carousel. And the third stitch I wanted to use (a variety of laced or threaded stitch) was again rather winding and would fit in well.
The time was right for a revamp. Carousel lost its central cross shape and its diamonds, and the spider’s webs were put in as surface stitches rather than filling stitches. The Maltese stitches were put in the four corners, and for the border I combined the braid stitch and the threaded stitch. It doesn’t look any more like a Carousel than the old version did, but suddenly it feels right. It may even get moved up the queue!
Y bars

From shape to name

Posted on 13th January, 2012 by Flights of Fancy

I suppose you could say that in naming anything pictorial you go from the shape to the the name. But sometimes the design is not quite a picture, it just has shapes which remind you of a picture. One of these is Kaleidoscope. I created those four small designs particularly to be quick stitches that would fit coasters. An hour’s (or two) stitching, then a coaster on which to put your drink – I was going to call them Happy Hour. I still think it would have been a good name; in fact, I may use it in future if I design some more itty-bitty charts. But then my husband (who is always ready with suggestions, some impossible, some inspiring, some both) said the shape of them reminded him of those patterns you get in a kaleidoscope. He was right, of course. So Kaleidoscope it was.

Another one, where the shape led to the name which in turn influenced the design, is BonBon. I designed it simply as a pleasing shape, then the four cut areas sticking out in the four corners, with their little square of Kloster blocks on the ends, reminded me of sweet wrappers. Just calling it Sweets didn’t seem right, so I looked around for alternatives and came up with BonBon, which then led to the choice of pink for the colour scheme.
BonBon
Two designs which are still on the To Do list also got their names from their shapes – I was playing around with cut areas within a large Kloster block square, and as I removed bits of the square, made some areas cut and left others uncut, I suddenly realised they looked like those windmills-on-sticks that you buy at the seaside and run with, and the wind makes them spin. So Windmills it became. I found a most patriotic red white and blue variegated thread to stitch it in, probably on hand-dyed fabric looking like blue sky with white clouds; as refreshing as a walk along the beach.
The other one is Cross My Heart, you can probably see why it got that name. It has hearts, it has crosses, so the name Cross My Heart practically thought of itself – sometimes a name is not just easy, it’s inevitable!

From occasion to name

Posted on 10th January, 2012 by Flights of Fancy

It sounds like good common sense to make names descriptive, so that people know what they’re getting. And sometimes a descriptive name happens to be just right for a design, in which case I’m happy to use it. Even a partly descriptive name, like Midnight Stroll (which does have midnight colours and stars and a moon, but nothing to do with a walk) may seem better than one which appears to have no connection at all to the design.

But sometimes designs are created for very specific occasions (they don’t always get used for the occasions that inspired them, but that’s another story); and in those cases, I like to somehow use the occasion in the name, even though it may not make much sense to anyone else. Will anyone who likes a particular design be put off by the fact that the name doesn’t sound very logical?
Some of my first designs were created for a course of beginners’ counted thread work that I taught at our local Adult Education centre, called the Percival Guildhouse. They were (you won’t be surprised by this), the Guildhouse needlebook and Percival. As it happens, by the time I had completed Percival to my satisfaction it had become far too complicated for the purpose, so I had to chart something simpler – this was Delft.

Another design that still shows its original purpose in its name but never got used for it is Lustrum. It’s not a very common word in English, but in Dutch it’s used for a celebration held every five years, especially to mark anniversaries; it’s usually universities or clubs, but it can be used for anything that has existed for five or a multiple of five years. As my husband and I celebrated five years of marriage in 2010, I wanted to design something to mark the occasion. This was Lustrum. It comes in two variations, one with shield-shaped bits of cutwork, and one with heart-shaped cutwork and room for initials and a date. I stitched the shield variation first, then chose the threads for the hearts-dates-and-initials version but never got round to stitching it … Perhaps in 2015?
Lustrum

From colour to name in another way

Posted on 7th January, 2012 by Flights of Fancy

Sometimes it’s not the name of the colours that lead to the name of the design, it’s the colours themselves. Delft and Citrus come into this category – there is nothing particularly citrussy about the latter apart from its green, yellow and orange colour scheme, and it is the blues in Delft that give it its name, rather than the fact that it looks like a pottery design. The Bittersweet designs I wrote about recently got their name in this way as well.

Some of the designs whose names are inspired by their colours may need a bit more explanation, though. Like Veronica. Not a girl’s name, in this case, but a tiny flower, more commonly known as Speedwell – which would have been a good name too and may well be used in future – and (as you may have guessed) blue. African Star (which hasn’t been stitched yet) is shaped like an 8-pointed star, but the African bit in the name comes from the colours it uses: red, gold and green, sometimes called the Pan-African colours. And Vienna is stitched in chocolate and coffee colours on chocolate brown fabric. With Vienna the home of coffee houses and Sachertorte, what else could I possibly have called it?

Spice Islands uses the colours of all those spices I love to use, like cinnamon, nutmeg, mace and cloves (the cut Hardanger bits in the desig are shaped like cloves). Nutmeg and cloves feature largely in Dutch cuisine, but they can be a bit startling to the British palate, so I tend to halve the amounts in any recipe I cook nowadays. Spice Islands is my tribute to Dutch cooking!
Another tribute to my Dutch heritage (if one can apply the grand name of heritage to something sweet eaten on bread) is Sprinkles, which shows how closely linked colour and shape and name can be. On the design’s info page I explain that the thread colours reminded me of the pink, yellow and orange of those sweet fruit sprinkles I used to eat as a child. This in turn influenced the shape of the design, which started out with four giant sprinkles arranged in the centre. As for the significance of the hearts and butterflies, well, uhm, I got a bit carried away while designing and didn’t have the heart to delete them once they were there …

And finally a case where the colour led to the name, which then led to another design (both still on the Planned page). I wanted to do something with the combination of moss green, brown and cream. The design turned out to be geometric rather than pictorial, so I turned to the colours for a name. Something mossy. Hmmm. Moss Rose? But there were no rosy colours in it at all. Then I remembered some pieces of agate I had had as a child, with bands of all sorts of lovely subdued colours, and I also remembered that one type of agate was called Moss Agate. Bingo. But I liked the colours so much I wanted to do another design using them. The word moss and the brown colour made me think of Reindeer Moss. I liked the name but felt there should be something in the design to reflect it; cue four satin stitch reindeer. This is what is so nice about letting colours inspire you – you never know what you’ll design next!

Gumnut Hardanger – a fiddly business

Posted on 5th January, 2012 by Flights of Fancy

Having decided to use the Gumnut stranded silk for cross stitch designs, I found I kept thinking of using it for Hardanger too, if only as an experiment. Gumnut used to do variegated shades as well (they are still on their site, but not made at the moment, I believe) and in my stash I have a perle in Dark Garnet and a stranded silk in Medium Garnet. I decided on a 36ct Edinburgh linen to get enough coverage in the Kloster blocks, and set out to stitch my small experiment motif.
It was certainly interesting to try – the unevenness of the linen made the coverage a bit uneven as well, and this was not helped by the fact that I only noticed some of the perle thread had stripped (and so I was stitching with a thinner thread) when I was half-way through. Even so, coverage looked OK when all the Kloster blocks had been stitched. But then came the time to cut.
Cutting 36ct linen, even using squissors, is a daunting task, and poking the cut ends in proved to be quite tricky too, but eventually I got it done (though they kept poking back out again). I then decided to duplicate the experiment on 36ct Fabric Flair evenweave, a cotton/modal mix and much more regular; also a bit more open, so it was just that little bit easier to cut. I might use this combination, of #8 perle and stranded silk or cotton on 36ct fabric, again some time, but I must remember to do the cutting by daylight! (You can click on the thumbnails for more detailed pictures.)

To give you an idea of the size, here is a picture of one of the 36ct experiments side by side with the same motif on my usual 25ct:

Flights of Fancy

Mabel's musings on anything stitchy

Yearly Archives: 2012