Spoiler alert – yes, after well over three years my Canvaswork is finally finished! Bar the mounting, which with canvas is a challenge in itself and will be part of the assessment; but although I will of course do my best to do it as neatly as possible, to me it doesn’t feel like part of the embroidery. That, the part that counts, is done.

You may remember that the previous FoF ended with most of the sky filled in, but the remaining tree as yet just an understitched grid, and me not able to see how it was going to work.

And so once again I looked for things to do that would help me avoid The Tree (which in my mind was beginning to take on Triffid-like qualities). The sky was the obvious thing. I’d noticed that there should have been some lighter blue blended into the section between the two top sails of the mill – there was some on either side of those sails, but none in that particular area, which looked like an oversight. Well, it was an oversight! I amended it by sneakily overstitching with a single strand of the second shade of blue; it may seem a little thing and hardly worth doing, but those few stitches make it look much more part of the rest of the sky.

On to the last remaining bit of sky; here the change from blend to blend had to be a little more abrupt in places, where the sky in the original photograph had some hazy white across the blue.

The only way I could avoid the tree any longer was by doing the overstitching on the mill, but I felt I really ought to cover the whole canvas first before doing those final details, so I gave myself a good talking to and got on with it. I started at the top using blue blended with brown to represent the branches showing through. After a few stitches it became clear that the blend was too thick and too brown, so they were unpicked and restitched. I blended a little green into the uprights of the foundation crosses, then more in the horizontals. That’s where I’d got to when my next class came round, where, rather surprisingly, it was just me and tutor Angela Bishop; a lovely surprise to begin the new year with, having a one-to-one class with the tutor who stood at the beginning of much of my RSN journey! We discussed initial ideas for Silk Shading, and then I got on with the tree. One of the things I’ve learnt during this module is to work like a painter, not charting but mxing and blending as I go, and on the whole I’m pleased with how that worked on this last tree.

Surely now it was time to get on with the mill? Well, no. I was keen to work on it, having discussed the various parts of it with Angela, but there were a few tweaks I wanted to put in first. One was the bush between the orange roof and the tree – the photograph had some dark bits in it which I hadn’t reproduced in the blends I used. So I sneaked a strand of dark into some of the foundation crosses of the Smyrna stitches; it’s almost imperceptible, and definitely difficult to show in a photograph, but like the added sky blending stitches it makes a difference when looked at from a distance. I also smoothed out the edge between the sky and the tree by lengthening some of the blue stitches and adding some small blue/green blended partial star stitches where the canvas wasn’t quite covered.

By the way, looking at the close-up pictures while writing this FoF I noticed a missing top half cross on one of the star stitches. Good thing it’s still framed up so I can put that in before mounting!

Anyway, yes, finally it’s time for the mill: the struts and balustrade of the gallery, and the sails consisting of the four wooden beams and the lattice. In order to simplify the design to make it more suitable for canvaswork I had decided after discussion with the tutors to leave out the sheets half-covering the sails, and the big beams sticking out from behind the cap. For the struts and balustrade I wanted to use perle #12 in white, but both Angela and I felt that it needed at least one other shade, probably a light grey. Going through my stash at home I found I didn’t have a grey, but I did have a cream and a pale greyish lavender, as well as some 12-weight Sulky threads. In the end I picked white and lavender perle and a grey Sulky. Angela had suggested securing the long struts by means of a stitch in the middle, worked in the invisible manner of attaching twist in goldwork, but when I had completed the struts I really liked the look of them attached only top and bottom, because it gives a more 3D effect than having them anchored in the middle, however invisibly; I’ll add a comment about that to the assessment notes I have to hand in, to show that it was a considered decision, not an oversight! The balustrade used the same three shades as the struts, except for the uprights which show up really bright in the photograph, so they were all done in white.

For the sails I pulled white ribbon through the canvas at the beginning and end of each beam. Angela had suggested couching with one or two stitches in thin silk along each side, but I remembered an idea I’d had earlier: why not secure the ribbon with the stitches making up the lattice? I did that and found that it pulled the ribbon to one side, so added a few stitches to the other edge of the ribbons after all. Getting the lattices reasonably regular was a very fiddly job (my first attempt was far too narrow and had to be unpicked), especially using a fine filament silk which snags on everything, but it did help that I had simplified it to have only two lines along the length of the sail instead of three as in the photograph.

And that was all the stitching done! Now all that was left was some hedge trimming. In order to minimise the amount of fluff attaching itself to my stitching an old, torn pillow case was given an additional, custom-sized hole, and I was ready to get snipping. This was done very very gradually, because as we all know you can’t un-cut. I tried to do some shaping as well so that the bush on the left ended up with a higher pile on one side that on the other. Finally the immediate surroundings of the bushes were carefully dabbed with scotch tape wound around a finger to clear any stray bits of fluff – mustn’t leave any for the assessors to spot!

So here it is, my Canvaswork finished (apart from that one stitch I missed and will need to add, grrr). Because the light direction makes quite a difference to the look of the piece, here are two photographs for you to blend in your mind into one picture

Whatever the assessment is going to be, I’m happy with what I’ve produced in a technique I had not previously tried, and to which I did not take naturally. It’s been an interesting experience which has taught me a lot. I look forward to seeing what I will learn in the Silk Shading module.