Recently I’ve been thinking of eyes in embroidery – there’s the eye of a needle, eyelet stitches, and I once devised a hardanger filling which I called “eyelash stitch” (although to be fair it could equally well have been named something like “sunburst”, especially four of them in the round as in that particular design, or “jazz hands” if you look at the top two only).

As we embroider we also gauge things by eye: what size needle we need, or which colour goes better with what has already been embroidered, and whether the bit of thread left in the needle will be enough to finish those last few stitches in that colour (profound piece of insight gained over the years: stitching faster does not make a difference). Some free spirits will even do away with patterns or charts and work whole embroideries by eye! It won’t surprise you to hear that generally that is not my approach, even less so in my Canvaswork piece. Last weekend I decided to tackle what I have christened the frilly tulip. I’d already sampled it twice, but hadn’t quite got the look I wanted.

Bearing in mind the slightly exasperated comment of one of my tutors that I shouldn’t try to make canvaswork look like needlepainting I decided to ignore the petal line down the middle; the whole tulip is only 15mm tall, so not that much scope for detail. But I did want to use the overdyed silk ribbon with the purple frill that I inherited from my mother-in-law, and to show the very dark little triangle at the bottom plus three other colour blocks: from left to right a darkish shade with purple and a little yellow in it, a very light yellow, and a more full-bodied yellow. The purple I’d used in the second sample was a bit too dark so I picked another one from my collection of Carrie’s Creations overdyed cottons; the lilac and two yellows are all from that range as well. (By the way, is it just me or does the ribbon look like a bunny rabbit?)

First I cut a piece of ribbon about twice the width of the tulip, folded the ends under and attached it to the top of the tulip with some translucent thread. Next was the body of the tulip; I liked the Parisian stitch used in the samples, but in one of the tulips the ribbon shone through the superimposed stitches, so my laying tool sprang into action to tease out the six blended strands and make them spread as much as possible. The dark triangle (actually a diamond shape as it blends into the stem) was worked in purple only, the left-hand side in a mix of three purple/two pale yellow/one lilac, the middle in four lilac/two pale yellow and the right-hand side in four yellow/two pale yellow. It’s definitely not needlepainting! But on the whole I think it captures the look of the tulip reasonably well.

Then I went on to the hut/cabin sitting on the far left of the horizon. And as this was going to be mostly straight stitches I grabbed the bull by the horns and went straight in without any sampling whatsover. I felt quite daring! Horizontal satin stitch in eight strands of a dark brown Carrie’s Creations cotton, followed by slanting stitches for the thatched roof in five threads of a serendipitously perfect Gentle Art wool – I only ever bought one of these to try out, years ago, and the shade (Maple Syrup) turned out to be just right. The stitches had to fan out slightly because more holes needed to be covered horizontally than vertically, and I did this by eye, judging whether there was enough coverage; I think it covers pretty well, and the adjacent bush will help too. Finally the windows, using straight stitches in white with grey for the tops to indicate the shadow cast by the roof. Again done by eye. I’m beginning to get used to this!

But of course all stitching is really done “by eye”. One of the reasons why that was brought home to me this week was that I experienced sudden flashes, floaters and blurring in my left eye last Sunday morning – not a good thing if you’re very short-sighted as it can be a sign that the retina is detaching. Fortunately a thorough examination found some bleeding but no visible tear in the retina, but they’ll do another check-up in two weeks’ time (or sooner if the flashes persist). Although it’s reassuring that they are taking it seriously and keeping a good eye on it, I will admit to being a bit shaken by this reminder of how fragile our sight is. But I’ve been encouraged by part of a hymn which has been running through my mind ever since:

Thou whose almighty word
chaos and darkness heard
and took their flight,
[…]
Let there be light!

Facebook threw up an interesting memory today – on 5th June last year (a Saturday) I completed my Goldwork module by handing in Bruce the golden kangaroo, a mere eight months after finishing the Jacobean module. That sort of time frame is firmly out of the question for my Canvaswork, but I felt rather pleased that I could mark Bruce’s anniversary with a finish-within-the-project: yes, the red tulip is complete!

Don’t expect a drumroll and a reveal quite yet – I’d like to keep him as the pièce de résistance of this FoF, so first here is some sampling I did for the smaller tulips. On the RSN’s Facebook page I came across a picture of a canvaswork piece with daffodils done in ribbon, and I remembered that I had picked some suitably coloured hand-dyed silk ribbons when I started this module, some of them inherited from my mother-in-law. I set about trying out various ways of depicting small, smaller and tiny tulips.

There is a very bright yellow tulip which looks less smooth than the tulips surrounding it, so I thought it might work well in ribbon satin stitch, as the edges of the ribbons would overlap and curl up and add some texture. To indicate an edge between petals I worked some of the vertical lines in two stitches. On the whole I like the look of it, but the colour is too dark and not bold enough; I will try again with a slightly lighter yellow ribbon. I also need to ask the tutor about the tiny bit of canvas visible along the dividing line (blue arrow); I can’t see how to cover that and still keep the edge.

I then tried some tiny tulips. One in simple satin stitch (didn’t much like the shape), one a lazy daisy (some canvas showing), and one a fan of five stitches (quite nice but too wide).

The fan with the two outer stitches taken out looked better, as did some lazy daisies with a straight stitch underneath. Yes, I can definitely see this working!

Back to the big tulip. But before I show you the finished article I’ll write a bit more about the process of creating this tulip, and like Julie Andrew I’ll start at the very beginning – the photograph on which my canvas design is based.

Right from the start I’d envisaged this tulip (for some reason I think of him as George) in a diagonal couched stitch. Fortunately, as I’ve come to realise after looking through several canvaswork books, you can do pretty much anything and there will be a name for it, including half a dozen variations by adding “vertical”, “horizontal”, “double”, “lengthened” and so on. The stitch I had in mind could be covered by “diagonal Bokhara couching”, “web stitch” or “Italian couching”. The idea was to couch long diagonal stitches in other colours, varying the placement and density of the couching stitches to create the shading. Because of the very dark shadow on the bottom left, I started out with a burgundy Caron Watercolours couched in equally burgundy Needlepoint Inc stranded silk.

After a while I added some lighter red couching stitches to create the curved shadow, then changed the foundation thread to an orangy-red shade of Watercolours couched in two shades: densely couched, four-strand burgundy, and two-strand red which became more widely-spaced after a while.

As I got near to where the large petal meets the smaller one on the right, I stopped a little early, because (canvaswork being stitched from the foreground towards the back) the right-hand petal should have been stitched first. This would be done in diagonals running in the opposite direction to the main petal. I chose some lighter couching threads to replicate the lighter shade of the thin petal.

But after a while it became clear that the petal was too wide, and also that couching in two strands didn’t give the dense coverage needed to achieve the required lightness. Out came the petal, and in came five needles with different four-strand blends, applied (as closely as possible) according to the photograph. It took quite a few hours, but then the new slimline petal was done, and I could get back to the main petal.

By the way, about halfway through this tulip I decided to try clamping the slate frame in the Lowery stand instead of using my lap stand; usually I would clamp any frame on the side, but I’d seen someone clamp the top of the slate frame so I thought I’d give that a go. Well, it works very well indeed! It doesn’t even need weights on the bottom to keep it steady. Sitting facing the window I get a good light, and a view of the garden (albeit rather blurry when I’m wearing my stitching glasses).

Before tackling the final part of the main petal I filled in the horizontally couched, rather dark bit at the bottom, then the highlight at the top of the main petal was couched in, and finally the inside of the right-hand petal, in horizontal couching like the bottom bit. This was unpicked after the first five or so rows had been couched because the last stitch of the big petal, which I’d debated about for yonks as to how long it should be, turned out to be too short after all, and I couldn’t correct that while the horizontal stitches were in place. Heigh-ho, best to get it right. One hole longer made that last diagonal look much better, and then I could finish the final part.

There is one tiny bit of canvas showing between the top foundation stitch of the right-hand petal and the foundation stitches of the horizontal part, but it really isn’t feasible to remedy that by inserting more of the Watercolours thread. I will ask if it is a big problem; if so, I could perhaps sneak some silk thread underneath the foundation stitches in a camouflaging colour.

Be that as it may, the tulip is finished and I am very pleased with it. In fact I feel so chuffed that even if the rest of the piece never quite manages to do justice to the photograph, it won’t matter. This is my little canvaswork triumph

Let me start with an abject apology for not having written for a month. Somehow there were too many other things going on, and I didn’t get much stitching done. In fact, I didn’t really get any stitching done on my Canvaswork since my last class until about a week ago. Still, there’s been just about enough progress to warrant an update, especially as there has been a slight change in my attitude to the work – I call it, with severe overstatement, the SAS approach.

No, nothing too physical and exciting. Just telling myself: “Who Dares Wins”.

You see, until my fourth class last month I had sampled and charted and sampled some more, but the real canvas still lay pristine and untouched apart from the design outline. So when, my sampled bud having received the seal of approval, I realised that for some reason the charted and sampled version wouldn’t fit into the final outline, I decided not to do another sample but to dive in and make what adjustments were needed on the fly. And it seems to have worked! By the end of the class I had one complete bud on the canvas, and I was very pleased with how it turned out.

I wasn’t quite so brave about the pink tulip; I knew it needed more blending, and I wanted to try out the effect of splitting the stitches. So out came the sample cloth again. When the tutor suggested that the result was too blocky and it might look better with equal stitch lengths, I sampled a bit of that too, but although I really liked the blended look on its own, it didn’t look right for the tulip – having taken a good long look at it I decided I preferred the less regimented look of varying the stitch length. So back home it was on to some more sampling for the vertical section, to get the shading in the right places and to practice juggling multiple needles.

The shading didn’t quite work out as planned when I followed my carefully charted version; for one thing the dark section (blue arrow in the fourth picture above) was too solid, and too large. I was just about to draw on another sample outline and possibly re-chart when the SAS spirit exerted itself once again. Let’s just get that tulip onto the canvas!

Mind you, it was probably cowardice rather than bravery which spurred me on – with my fifth class coming up and precious little progress to report I just couldn’t face having to admit to the tutor that my only work over the past month was on the sample cloth… Still, it did nudge me into action, and I sat down with several needles loaded with a variety of blends, and the colour photograph next to the outline to guide my blend choices and stitch lengths. It took me two afternoons, but then I had a complete pink tulip ready to show to the tutor this Saturday.

It contains eight or so blends using two stranded cottons (Carrie’s Creations, now alas discontinued) and four stranded silks (Chameleon Threads’ Shades of Africa, an overdyed Soie d’Alger), and the stitches split into each other except where there are several petals within the vertically stitched part: in order to suggest some petal edges I kept the stitches separate there. Am I completely satisfied with it? No. The separating line should have gone a little further down on the left-hand side (green arrow), and the second-darkest blend has spread a bit too much in the centre (blue arrow). However, I don’t dislike these two things enough to unpick the whole thing, having finally dared to stitch it on the actual project.

Incidentally, I should have worked the two small diagonal bits at the top and bottom after the vertical petals, as canvaswork is stitched front to back, and those two small areas are furthest back of all the petals. But in my sample I’d found it almost impossible to tuck the stitches under the previously worked parts in a satisfactory manner, so I cheated. Don’t tell the assessors.

And here is my progress so far – not a lot, but to me it represents a challenge faced, a hurdle overcome, and the whole project now looks just that little bit less daunting. True, this module may take rather more than the usual eight classes, but I’m in no hurry. And I want to keep enjoying it.

In class I hope to tackle the big red tulip. I’ve chosen my threads: a couple of Caron Watercolours for the laid work, plus three Needlepoint Inc silks and three Victoria Clayton Hand-Dyed Fibres silk floss (like Carrie’s Creations unfortunately discontinued) for the couching. Aren’t they lovely colours to play with? Let’s see what I dare tomorrow, and what I win!