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!