The last time I updated you on my RSN Certificate Canvaswork module was back in August, when I had finished the bottom half of the design, a bit of mill, and the bottom layer of the rice stitches one day to become a light and airy tree. Oh, and some trunks. What has happened in the intervening four and a half months?
Well, for one thing I removed the lasso that was holding the Turkey rug bushes on the left out of the way, as there is no more stitching to do on the bottom half, and if anything I now needed to push them down so I could work on the stitching above it. But that side of the design would come later – first there was the mill and the right-hand tree. I started with the door, which, you may remember, had some threshold trouble. Because of the way the paving was stitched, it was impossible to create a neat bottom edge just by using vertical stitches, so on the advice of the tutor I reworked it with shorter stitches and then worked a horizontal stitch over the bottom. My first attempt used the holes at the bottom of the stitches making up the edges of the door, forgetting that the pull of the stitch would make it look too short. Unpick and work it one hole either side of the door and yes, that looked better.
More mill then – the bottom half, worked using the same thick soft cotton as the top half, in straight and slanted split gobelin stitch in four shades of brick. A small window and what looks like a white poster were added as well, with details like the window frame to be added later with thinner thread.
At this point I was alternating between mill and tree, partly because both were scary – the mill because I hadn’t really thought yet what to do about the cap, which has quite a bit of detail in it, and the tree because I couldn’t quite see how to recreate the airy look with the top half of the rice stitches. Still, it had to be done at some point, so I decided on a painterly approach: lots of needles threaded with a variety of blends, the photograph next to the bit of canvas I’m working on, and use whatever blend looks most suitable for each stitch. It took a while, and as always with canvaswork the painterly style is distinctly Impressionist, but a light and airy tree it is.
Back to the mill, specifically the sails. It is the nature of the technique that you can’t get absolutely every detail in without getting overly fussy, and one of the design decisions has been to leave out the fabric that partly covers the sails of the mill. What is left is the four wooden “arms” and the lattice attached to each one of these, all of which will be stitched on top of a background of mostly sky. In my sampling I had stitched a foundation of white tent stitches on which the ribbon for the wooden arms would sit, and I decided to put that foundation in so that I would be able to work the sky all around that and still see where the sails should go.
Now I could make a start on the sky, working from right to left. With Kathryn I had worked out a rough guide to where the colour changes and the stitch transitions were going to be, and because so far I had only sampled the three sky stitches in white perle cotton she asked me to do a sample in the blue Caron silks I’d be using on the real thing, to work out coverage. Then I put together the blends I intended to use – although the five Caron blues I picked make up a series, the three middle ones are very close together in shade while there is quite a gap between them and the darkest and lightest shades, so I couldn’t just change from one to another (some of the lighter blends also include a fuzzy white thread to mimic the hazy clouds). After that it was finally time to put in the first of the stitches that will make up one of the main features of the design, that bright blue sky.
There are many challenges in that sky: the colour changes have to be gradual; the transitions from horizontal Milanese stitch to Hungarian grounding to Parisian stitch must not be abrupt, but with bits of one pattern extending into the next to prevent clear demarcation lines; the sky stitches should blend into the stitches of the elements they surround in a natural way. That last one is especially important when it comes to the two trees, as the stitches used in them are either made up entirely of diagonal elements (rice stitch, in the right-hand tree) or have a strong diagonal component (star stitch, in the as yet non-existent left-hand tree), while the sky stitches are all horizontal. Once or twice I found that I had to lengthen a sky stitch to encroach into the tree stitches, but eventually the right-hand tree was completely encased in sky and looking very comfortable!
In between bits of sky Kathryn and I also looked at the bush on the left-hand side, above the two buildings and behind the main tree. I didn’t want to use more Turkey rug stitch as that would bring it forward too much, so I wondered about French knots like the hedge on the right. Kathryn felt that the area was too big for French knots and suggested an upright stitch with some texture to it, worked in the same threads as the Turkey rug bushes. Looking through my big canvaswork book I picked alternating smyrna stitch to sample, liked the look of it, and worked the bush with a bit of blue blended into the mix where the sky shines through the greenery. Some of the stitches are a bit too light compared to the photograph but I like the effect so I’m leaving them as they are.
Back to the mill to add the gallery and the cap. The latter took me a few goes to get right, because at first it looked too chunky and I couldn’t work out how to get in the detail I wanted without doing the whole thing in tent stitch, but eventually some small overstitches did the trick.
After that, more sky. And more sky. And yet more sky. Anything to avoid having to work on that big tree on the left. I knew it would have couched leather trunks and foliage in star stitch, but whenever I contemplated actually stitching it my brain seemed to shut down. I decided to at least try and get those trunks done, and wonder of wonders, the trimmed-down leather thong (once used to hold together a set of leather coasters that were a present from a friend in Kenya) held down with irregular couching stitches in beige-brown blends of stranded cotton actually looks like a pair of tree trunks!
With a certain desperation I started getting all the blends for the tree ready, in the hope that inspiration would strike. It didn’t. I decided on more sky. Strictly speaking you should work foreground elements before the background, and I’ve stuck to that fairly well, but Helen McCook had advised me to work some horizontal sky stitches inside the tree area to make sure it blended in well, and my excuse was that I had to make sure the pattern of the sky was continuous. Counting all the way from the blue on the right-hand side was obviously fraught with risk, so I compromised by working a thin line of sky along the top and then down along the left-hand side of the tree-that-wasn’t-there-yet.
I then ventured into some star stitches, only to find that they didn’t cover the canvas properly. A quick look at my sample cloth reminded me that it needed understitching which I hadn’t done. So I unpicked what I’d done, did the understitching in the blue blends I had prepared, and will add an extra strand to them for the upright crosses that form the foundation of the star stitches.
Still reluctant to get on with the foliage I stitched, yes, some more sky. I had noticed that my blending on the right-hand side was not as gradual as I would have liked – there is distinct banding. Not enough for me to unpick the whole thing , but on the left-hand side I’m paying more attention to this, introducing new blends gradually and alternating stitches in two blends on any transition line.
And that’s where I am at the moment. My aim was to get the sky and that tree filled in before my next class, using our time off over Christmas and the new year. As the business has now re-opened and my next class is less than a week away, that may prove too ambitious, but I’m hoping for a productive Saturday. After that, all (haha…) that is left to do is trim the Turkey rug bushes, do the top stitching on the mill, and mount the work ready for assessment. And then on to Silk Shading!
This has been a real labour of love (presumably!), hasn’t it? But as usual, the results are stunning, Mabel.
Not sure I’m feeling the love for canvaswork, but it has been a very interesting process and I have learnt a lot, which is great. And when I remember to stand back and look at it from a reasonable distance, I am actually rather pleased with it 🙂 !