In my celebratory FoF last Saturday I mentioned that in going through my close-up photographs, choosing illustrations, I’d noticed a missing stitch. Yesterday afternoon, replete with chicken pie and a friend’s delicious homemade lemon ice cream, I decided to put the missing stitch in. And that would be that! Except it wasn’t. Part of this, I fully admit, was just me being fussy. And at some point I will have to stop fussing or I will never get this mounted! But here is what happened.

Having shown off my finished-but-for-one-stitch canvaswork to the friends who’d come round for lunch I re-clamped it into the Lowery stand which for the past couple of days had held my or nué snowdrop, and got out the thread box containing a few left-over threads from my three-year project. Why I kept those few straggly bits of green, brown and blue in the small box destined for my silk shading colours after putting all the canvaswork threads back into their usual storage boxes I do not know, but I was very grateful for my eccentric decision as it meant I didn’t have to hunt through half the craft room to get the right threads. Time to take a close look at the missing stitch and decide what blend was needed. It was then that I noticed More Missing Stitches .

Ignore the purple arrow for the moment, I’ll come back to that one. The orange arrow points to the stitch I noticed when writing the previous FoF. The yellow arrow points to another incomplete stitch which had managed to remain unnoticed. Or – I am inclined to overthink these things – had it been a design decision to leave that stitch without its top cross? Would I ruin the entire look of the thing by completing it? As I couldn’t remember it being a conscious decision the best thing seemed to complete it with the same blend as the other stitch, although in the end I did go for a three-quarter cross rather than the full cross as I didn’t want to cover up too much of the leather tree trunk.

Back to that purple arrow. It points to a stitch that was one of the last ones to be worked; it is slightly isolated, it needed only the top cross, in the photograph it shows as a light green part of the tree, and I happened to have in my needle a remnant of the light green wool I’d used for the more textured stitches a little lower down. I added some blue and worked the top cross. And although I didn’t mention it in FoF, or even admit it to myself, it bothered me every time I looked at it. It is blobby. It is fluffy. It is wrong. And I might as well do something about it. So I did. I unpicked the top cross, which fortunately wasn’t attached to any other stitches, and re-did it in a blend without wool. It is still a little chunky, but it blends in much better with its surroundings.

And so now I’m really done. Really. No more fussiness. Unless perhaps to re-do that stitch once more to make it less chunky… No! No, really done now. Look: the finished piece. At last .

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.

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!

And, to be fair, quite a few other colours as well, eventually. But as I was labouriously working my way through the dreaded Green Jumble in my RSN Canvaswork, some beige paving was the first thing to offer relief from the relentless succession of greens and more greens – green silk, green stranded cotton, green wool, green perlé; plain green, variegated green and blended green. Not quite 40 Shades of Green, but pretty close. With quite a lot of jumble still to fill in, I felt I needed a break. Some nice simple paving in a nice simple stitch would just fit the bill!

I mentioned that paving in my last update, but mostly as it touched upon the tulips near it, so I thought I’d describe it in a bit more detail. As it happens, the paving turned out not to be as simple as I had imagined. For one thing, in my mind it was, well, paving-coloured. Beige. But closer inspection of my source picture showed it to be a mix of beiges, greys and blues, with a touch of white here and there. In order to achieve the matt texture I wanted I’d chosen Danish Blomstergarn (also called flower threads), an unmercerised cotton; the stitch I’d decided on was Oblique Slav worked in three threads, which offered scope for blending. When I first considered the paving I’d picked six shades of the Blomstergarn, but as I started stitching I realised that range wasn’t nearly wide enough to replicate the colours with any amount of accuracy. Back to my box of Danish delights to add a light blue, a light grey and another couple of beiges. Which turned out still not to be enough, so two more greys were added, bringing the number of shades to twelve. With up to eight needles on the go at any one time it wasn’t what you would call straightforward, but at least it wasn’t green .

Along the way there was some unpicking because of an incorrectly worked stitch, straight compensating stitches added along the top of the paving to create a nice level edge, and a bit of overstitched shading, but in a lot less time than the green had been taking the paving was done! (OK, full disclosure – it wasn’t. As I continued with the green and the small tulips furthest towards the back I kept adding more bits of paving where I felt it should shine through the greenery and flowers. But most of it was done by this time.)

After that, it was back to the green. Suffice it to say that it took a long time, and a lot of different blends (some including reds, pinks and yellows – the excitement!), and occasionally I saved my sanity by working on some more tulips, but eventually all the areas around the large tulips and leaves were filled. Although with the tutor I’d identified a few places where stems had to be added on top of the stitching, the green jumble was pretty much finished.

You may have noticed in that last photograph that I had played around with ribbon to create two small tulips and a bud on the edges of the design, but the big ribbon-tulip finale would have to wait a bit while I started on a tree and a hedge. The tree, or more accurately clump of trees, on the right is going to be done in rice stitch – a cross stitch with four small diagonal stitches over the arms. This means that you can in theory get 6 colours or blends into any one stitch, making it a great choice for the airy look needed, as it could combine my sky threads with my tree threads. After sampling several options (including one with the crosses worked in different directions, which was voted down by Kathryn as too fussy) I’d agreed with the various tutors that I would do all the foundation crosses first, in blends that would set out the basic shape of the tree and the distribution of greens and blues; then create two trunks by means of wrapped wire over the top; and finally add the top stitches to create the fine detail. I would also work the hedge at the bottom of the trees, extended up to the mill. Well, I managed the tree foundation (in several blends of blue Caron Soie Cristale with white Madeira Lana and five shades of green Heathway Milano crewel wool) and the hedge (French knots in three blends of green) before I was seduced by the idea of really finishing the bottom half of the design for good and all, and getting on with the tulips!

This was the fun part: rummaging through my stash of silk ribbons, working out how to use the variegated ones to such an effect that it needed less fastening on and off, and “painting” the little flowers with one eye on the source picture and an Impressionist mindset.

Before my floral extravaganza, I’d made a start on the mill in class, trying to recreate the grey upper part with its stark shadows in soft cottons, using several variations of gobelin stitch; and I’d also worked the door in dark green silk, but because of the way the top edge of the paving is stitched, it turned out to be impossible to make a smooth edge between it and the bottom of the door. I discussed it with Helen J, who suggested using stitches that stop just short of the paving and working a stitch over the top. Having done the shorter stitches I’m not sure I like the look of it so that may get unpicked.

And finally, the tree trunks. Two gauges of wire, which in the end unfortunately didn’t make that much of a difference, wrapped in a doubled strand of variegated brown. Secured at the beginning and end, and with an occasional stitch-through-the-canvas along the length of the wire.

And that’s where I’ve got to. Now it will have to be put away for a bit while I concentrate on stitched models for classes and instructions for magazine articles. But I’m really pleased that after all this time, the bottom half is complete and I’ve made a good start on the top half. I’ll finish this module yet !

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.