After a few false starts, could this short scribble be the re-ignition of FoF? If so, the title of this particular flight will turn out to be doubly appropriate. But I intended it to refer to the stitching I did today on my RSN Canvaswork. It wasn’t much, and in fact part of it was unpicking, but it has got me back into the project, and so however minimal my progress is, its significance is great – to me at least . I will write in more detail about the interminable third module of my Certificate in a future FoF, but for now I present to you an extended tulip, and some modified paving.

Let’s begin by having a look at what needed modifying. The small picture shows part of the printed photograph I’m working from; it’s what I’m aiming to represent in canvas stitches. This means a lot of simplifying and stylising – canvaswork is not photo-realistic. Still, you don’t want to oversimplify, and that is rather what had happened on the left-hand side of the paving (orange arrows). In the photograph it is mottled, on the canvas it is a uniform brown blob, all the more noticeable because all the rest of the paving uses blended threads. And how I managed to squash that orangy-red tulip (light blue arrows) to about half its height I do not know, but it obviously needed extending. Finally, the bit of paving between that tulip and the one above it needed unpicking because I’d failed to keep the stitch pattern going (yellow arrow); the bottom three stitches had to be split in two to continue the diagonal line where the stitches meet.

For the brown blob the options were: unpicking and restitching with a blend instead of three threads of the same brown, or adding a few random stitches in a single thread of grey. The latter would mean that some of the stitches would consist of four threads instead of three. Would that be very noticeable? I suspected it wouldn’t. I was right. If you look very closely, you can tell (orange arrow). The assessors may well look closely enough to tell. But I am not going to unpick a perfectly good bit of paving just for that. I have learnt something important: I am not as much of a perfectionist as I thought!

Next was the combination of the squashed tulip and the paving that didn’t have the right stitch pattern. Here I was lucky, not once but twice. First of all, the bit of paving that needed unpicking turned out to be at the start of a thread, which made it much easier to take out what needed taking out without disturbing the remaining stitches. The second bit of luck was the way the tulip worked out. When I’d pointed it out in class, the tutor had suggested first restitching the paving with the correct pattern and then extending the tulip over the top. I decided to go rogue and extend the tulip first. This turned out to fill almost the entire unpicked space, with only a very small bit of canvas still bare (blue arrow).

Not only that, but a closer inspection of the photograph showed that some of the narrow space between the extended tulip and the one above it was actually leaf and stem rather then paving. A few green stitches, some of them partly over the top of the paving, sorted that. Finally I filled in a small area between the two largish pink tulips with paving in two blends (green arrow), and that was the end of my stitching session.

Judged by the number of stitches worked, or the area of canvas covered, it’s not much. But I sat down and worked on it, and when I got up I liked the look of it better than at the beginning. That will do me just fine.