Last month I triumphantly posted that my Canvaswork was finished! Then a couple of days later I posted that it was really finished! Today I’m posting (slightly manically by now) that it is really really absolutely truly finished. Because *drumroll* it has been mounted, and let me tell you that that is no mean feat when working with canvas. Will these fingers ever play the violin again? Well, they might if they’d ever played the violin in the first place, but the point is that mounting canvas is very, very hard on both one’s hands and one’s temper. The canvas may not fray, but the nerves definitely do!

By the way, a small digression – before getting to this final stage I photographed the back of the canvas. Normally I really don’t care what the back of my work looks like as long as it doesn’t interfere with the front (for example by having dark threads shine through from the back, or lumpy knots causing bumps when framing the work), but a few classes ago, as I had my frame upside down to fasten off a thread, the tutor walked past and said “oh, your back is very neat!” As I had just been contemplating the thick tangle of threads and ribbons and thinking it looked a bit of a mess, this was a pleasant surprise, so I decided that just this once I would keep a record of my apparently-not-so-messy back. I’m beginning to think of it as a sort of Van Gogh impression of the front!

Back to mounting. It is a bit of a bone of contention among Certificate & Diploma students. Few people actively enjoy it, and many feel that being assessed on it in every single module is a little harsh, especially on those who are jolly good at embroidery but not very good at mounting. Still, there it is, it’s part of the brief and so like every other student I just had to get on with it. The first step was to measure the project while still under tension, add the required margins and calculate the size of mount board needed. Then cut two identical rectangles and stick them together, as the RSN provides 2mm board which on its own isn’t stiff enough. I asked after my first module why they didn’t just use 4mm board and was told that 4mm board is very hard to cut. I can now tell you that they are absolutely right, because having cut two (almost) identical rectangles with very great effort, the tutor noticed that it was in fact 4mm board and I needed to have cut only one. Oh well, at least I now had the option of using the neatest of the two.

Next the mount board was covered in calico, pulled taut and glued at the back, leaving an unglued strip around the very edge where the herringbone stitching would sit. While the glue was drying, I marked the centres of the sides on the canvas with some tacking (not very visible in the picture), then cut the canvas off the frame and removed the herringbone tape from the sides. Finally it was time to start pinning the canvas to the mount board.

Now I’d been warned that canvas is one of the hardest materials to mount, and they weren’t joking. It is stiff, it has very little give, and I found it almost impossible to manipulate when getting to the corners. This meant that although canvas is in theory the easiest to get on the grain (because you can clearly see a row of holes to pin), it was extremely difficult to get that row exactly on the edge of the mount board if it wasn’t there right away. I pulled, I pushed, I wiggled, I put pins in at odd angles in the hope that then pushing them straight would magically move the canvas – to no avail. Yes, I did manage to get all the pins in the same row of holes, but some were very close to the top of the mount board edge, some lower down, and some of the pins distorted the canvas in trying to get the right row on the edge. However, by this time the skin on my fingers was literally beginning to peel away in places, and so I decided it would have to do.

On to the herringboning. Using a curved needle and buttonhole thread, and trying not to get it tangled in all the pins sticking out (a paper strip folded around them helps a bit), you attach the canvas to the calico in that unglued channel, pulling both the canvas and the stitches taut all the time. When you get to a mitred corner it gets ladder-stitched up, after which you push the needle back up the corner and pull it tight, which (all being well) closes up the corner neatly. Because the stitches inevitably slacken off after a while, it is advisable to tighten them along the line before getting to a corner, because after a corner the previous side is very difficult to adjust. Guess how I know this… Yes, I did manage to, but it is much, much less complicated to remember to do it in time!

Now for the final stage, attaching the sateen backing. In order to reduce bulk I trimmed the canvas underneath the mitred corners, then removed the pins, cut the sateen to size and ironed it. As I ironed it I noticed some staining, but fortunately it was on the part of the fabric that would be folded under. The folded sateen was pinned onto the canvas and then it was just a matter of going round ladder-stitching sateen and canvas together as invisibly and regularly as possible. Because of the bulk in the corners it hadn’t been possible (at least I didn’t manage) to pull the canvas round the mount board equally far all around, so although I attached the sateen along a single row of canvas holes, the edge wasn’t quite straight. Still, I felt this would be less noticeable than jumping from one row of holes to another. I managed to keep the corners reasonably crisp by making sure the last stitch of each side emerged from the very tip of the fabric, but trying to keep the sateen flat against the back of the work was beyond me, with so much stiff, springy canvas underneath. Perhaps if I had tried to pull it extra taut while stitching it would have been a little better, but by now I just wanted it to be done!

So was this it then? No, not quite. With most fabrics, this is when you go over the edges to “heal” the pin holes. With canvas the pins go through existing holes so that’s not a problem, but where the pins had strained against the canvas the weave had distorted, so I stroked it back into shape along the edge. Finally a name tape was added to the back, and that was that. Nearly. Because remember that requirement that there should be “no alien fibres”? And remember our resident feline? So with tweezers and a hawk-like stare I went over the entire piece, removed a fair amount of fur and some other bits that shouldn’t be there, and then, yes, that was finally it.

Now all that remained was to ask Mr Mabel to take the obligatory photo-with-finished-embroidery, and to pack it up, well bubble-wrapped, to send it off by registered post to Hampton Court Palace for assessment – and Royal Mail had better not lose it!

And as one of the criteria on which the work will be assessed is how well the embroidery captures the source image, here is one last photograph showing the two together. It took a mere three years and four months to turn the one into the other. (To put this into perspective, have a look at this blog post by the Stitching Sheep, my compatriot Marlous, who finished her Canvaswork in two weeks during a summer intensive course. I stand in awe.)

Three modules down, one to go (for the Certificate, at least) – on to Silk Shading .