Looking back on my Canvaswork posts I realise I never updated you on my last class on 29th April. By 28th April nothing much had happened since the February class, but as I really couldn’t attend with nothing done at all I decided on some sampling. Helen McC had asked me to sample another background texture for the leafy jumble between the tulips, as she felt it needed three sizes rather than the two I’d done so far. She liked the staggered crosses, so I tried those using two plies of Caron Watercolours for the large crosses and one strand each of dark green and dark blue DMC for the small ones (the photograph shows only some of the small crosses done). By mistake I reversed the large crosses in the top row and found that I actually like the effect of that better with the other background (upright crosses) next to it, so that was a lucky error!

I also sampled the smallest of the three textures, lazy kalem, using one ply of Caron Watercolours only (orange arrow), then adding a strand of very dark green DMC (green arrow), then adding a strand of very dark blue to that (blue arrow). I couldn’t see any difference that wasn’t accounted for by the Caron variegation. Nor could Helen J who taught the April class. So one ply of Watercolour it is.

In class I played around with the medium-sized tulips behind the two very big ones, sampling split gobelin in Madeira silk which I liked apart from the colours (not enough blending) and a vertical herringbone variation in vintage silk originally intended for the pointy-petalled tulip which turned out not to work for any of them. A shame, because I did like the texture of the stitch. Perhaps I can use it somewhere else.

My homework for the next class, on 24th June, was to be the second hut and bush, the middle medium tulip and some more sampling for the pointy-petalled one. I managed one roof. Then the class was cancelled because too few people had signed up, and I cancelled one in early July because of a walk in memory of a church friend who had died suddenly and far too young. I was offered a replacement class for the one cancelled by the RSN on 22nd July, and decided to do some homework in preparation for that.

Looking at the roof I’d stitched, I didn’t like it. It’s a slanted buttonhole stitch with the ridge on the top, and the ridge was slightly irregular. I unpicked and restitched it. It was still slightly irregular, so I think I’ll just have to live with that! I also worked the rest of the hut, in horizontal satin stitches to depict the wooden planks, in two shades to show the shadow on the wood, and added two white lines to the roof because they are there in the photograph although I have no idea what they are. Finally the second bush, like the first one in Turkey rug stitch in a number of blends using crewel wool, vintage silk, flat silk and an anonymous matt twisted thread. I do dislike the fact that I’m not allowed to cut them until right at the end, because I can foresee that they will get horribly in the way! Still, it was progress. And then the RSN cancelled the 22nd July class as the tutors wouldn’t be able to get to Rugby because of the planned railway strikes. Oh well, at least it had spurred me on to do some work.

The cancellation meant that my next class won’t be until 19th August, a little under four months after the last one. Really, I should be able to show the tutor more than one hut and one bush! As we had extensively discussed the medium-sized tulips and some of the greenery, I decided to have a go at that. First the middle one of the three tulips; using Madeira silk as in the sampling, but more blended. In split gobelin, except where I wanted to indicate the line between petals, where the stitches would abut each other. I was quite pleased with how that turned out, apart from a little too much of the lightest shade (blue arrow). Still, I didn’t dislike it enough to unpick it .

On to the left-hand tulip. I’d got some lovely Au Ver à Soie flat silk (Soie Ovale) for this tulip, but on reflection the shade was too peachy, so I went with some Eterna flat silk combined with one dark red Silk Mill silk. It uses the same split gobelin approach with abutting stitches for the petal line, and because I wanted that line to be quite clear, I found I had to work a tiny extra stitch before fastening off the lightest blend so the final stitch pulled in the right direction. The things you have to think of when doing canvaswork!

And then the tulip was finished. And I liked the colour and the blending. But. There were coverage issues, and more importantly, the shape was wrong. Somehow the tulip had got rather bloated, and compared to its intended outline it was too wide.

The next day I bit the bullet and decided that it would have to come out. I printed the comparison photograph and marked it up to show which stitches needed to go. I also outlined the areas for the different blends, chucked the Silk Mill silk which has a slightly different texture from the Eternas, put new blends together and did as much prep as I could possibly do. Then some careful snipping and tweezering and the tulip was a fluffy pile of thread bits.

With twelve instead of ten strands in my needle (or rather, needles), I set to work; Eterna silk has been discontinued but fortunately I had enough left for this revamp! In marking up the tulip I’d also done some remedial work on the petal line, and fortunately I did much prefer the look of the restitched version (on the left in the comparison picture below). On consideration I should perhaps have kept that darker Silk Mill shade, but on the whole it is definitely an improvement, and much more like the intended outline. Phew! There are still some gaps, but I’m afraid they’ll just have to stay – more than twelve strands simply gets too bulky, and a major cause of the gaps is the fact that the stitches are split, which I can’t do anything about.

And finally, back to the middle tulip. Or rather, what I noticed when I started stitching it. The right-hand petal of my pride and joy, the big red tulip, was not as pointy as it should be!

It was very, very fiddly fitting in one short diagonal stitch in Caron Watercolours, and even more fiddly getting the couching stitches over it. By doubling a single ply of Watercolours I could start with a loop start, which was one less end to secure at the back – a good thing as the stitching is so densely packed there that it is difficult to get a needle through to fasten off. For the two couching stitches I really needed two blends, because one had to be redder than the other, but I got around that by manipulating the four strands in the blend so that the darker strands were more prominent at the very tip (blue arrow), and the lighter ones at the stitch further in (green arrow). Was this tweak really necessary? Probably not; I doubt if anyone else would notice if I hadn’t added the extra stitch. But it was worth it for me, which is what counts in cases like these. If it doesn’t bother you, leave it. If it will irk you whenever you look at it, take it out and re-do it. You’ll be much happier for it .

And that’s where it stands at the moment! Leafy stuff is my task for next weekend – after all the reds and pinks it’s going to be green, green, green. But all in silks and cottons, and not a trowel or pair of seccateurs in sight; very much my sort of gardening!

Recently I’ve been thinking of eyes in embroidery – there’s the eye of a needle, eyelet stitches, and I once devised a hardanger filling which I called “eyelash stitch” (although to be fair it could equally well have been named something like “sunburst”, especially four of them in the round as in that particular design, or “jazz hands” if you look at the top two only).

As we embroider we also gauge things by eye: what size needle we need, or which colour goes better with what has already been embroidered, and whether the bit of thread left in the needle will be enough to finish those last few stitches in that colour (profound piece of insight gained over the years: stitching faster does not make a difference). Some free spirits will even do away with patterns or charts and work whole embroideries by eye! It won’t surprise you to hear that generally that is not my approach, even less so in my Canvaswork piece. Last weekend I decided to tackle what I have christened the frilly tulip. I’d already sampled it twice, but hadn’t quite got the look I wanted.

Bearing in mind the slightly exasperated comment of one of my tutors that I shouldn’t try to make canvaswork look like needlepainting I decided to ignore the petal line down the middle; the whole tulip is only 15mm tall, so not that much scope for detail. But I did want to use the overdyed silk ribbon with the purple frill that I inherited from my mother-in-law, and to show the very dark little triangle at the bottom plus three other colour blocks: from left to right a darkish shade with purple and a little yellow in it, a very light yellow, and a more full-bodied yellow. The purple I’d used in the second sample was a bit too dark so I picked another one from my collection of Carrie’s Creations overdyed cottons; the lilac and two yellows are all from that range as well. (By the way, is it just me or does the ribbon look like a bunny rabbit?)

First I cut a piece of ribbon about twice the width of the tulip, folded the ends under and attached it to the top of the tulip with some translucent thread. Next was the body of the tulip; I liked the Parisian stitch used in the samples, but in one of the tulips the ribbon shone through the superimposed stitches, so my laying tool sprang into action to tease out the six blended strands and make them spread as much as possible. The dark triangle (actually a diamond shape as it blends into the stem) was worked in purple only, the left-hand side in a mix of three purple/two pale yellow/one lilac, the middle in four lilac/two pale yellow and the right-hand side in four yellow/two pale yellow. It’s definitely not needlepainting! But on the whole I think it captures the look of the tulip reasonably well.

Then I went on to the hut/cabin sitting on the far left of the horizon. And as this was going to be mostly straight stitches I grabbed the bull by the horns and went straight in without any sampling whatsover. I felt quite daring! Horizontal satin stitch in eight strands of a dark brown Carrie’s Creations cotton, followed by slanting stitches for the thatched roof in five threads of a serendipitously perfect Gentle Art wool – I only ever bought one of these to try out, years ago, and the shade (Maple Syrup) turned out to be just right. The stitches had to fan out slightly because more holes needed to be covered horizontally than vertically, and I did this by eye, judging whether there was enough coverage; I think it covers pretty well, and the adjacent bush will help too. Finally the windows, using straight stitches in white with grey for the tops to indicate the shadow cast by the roof. Again done by eye. I’m beginning to get used to this!

But of course all stitching is really done “by eye”. One of the reasons why that was brought home to me this week was that I experienced sudden flashes, floaters and blurring in my left eye last Sunday morning – not a good thing if you’re very short-sighted as it can be a sign that the retina is detaching. Fortunately a thorough examination found some bleeding but no visible tear in the retina, but they’ll do another check-up in two weeks’ time (or sooner if the flashes persist). Although it’s reassuring that they are taking it seriously and keeping a good eye on it, I will admit to being a bit shaken by this reminder of how fragile our sight is. But I’ve been encouraged by part of a hymn which has been running through my mind ever since:

Thou whose almighty word
chaos and darkness heard
and took their flight,
[…]
Let there be light!

Facebook threw up an interesting memory today – on 5th June last year (a Saturday) I completed my Goldwork module by handing in Bruce the golden kangaroo, a mere eight months after finishing the Jacobean module. That sort of time frame is firmly out of the question for my Canvaswork, but I felt rather pleased that I could mark Bruce’s anniversary with a finish-within-the-project: yes, the red tulip is complete!

Don’t expect a drumroll and a reveal quite yet – I’d like to keep him as the pièce de résistance of this FoF, so first here is some sampling I did for the smaller tulips. On the RSN’s Facebook page I came across a picture of a canvaswork piece with daffodils done in ribbon, and I remembered that I had picked some suitably coloured hand-dyed silk ribbons when I started this module, some of them inherited from my mother-in-law. I set about trying out various ways of depicting small, smaller and tiny tulips.

There is a very bright yellow tulip which looks less smooth than the tulips surrounding it, so I thought it might work well in ribbon satin stitch, as the edges of the ribbons would overlap and curl up and add some texture. To indicate an edge between petals I worked some of the vertical lines in two stitches. On the whole I like the look of it, but the colour is too dark and not bold enough; I will try again with a slightly lighter yellow ribbon. I also need to ask the tutor about the tiny bit of canvas visible along the dividing line (blue arrow); I can’t see how to cover that and still keep the edge.

I then tried some tiny tulips. One in simple satin stitch (didn’t much like the shape), one a lazy daisy (some canvas showing), and one a fan of five stitches (quite nice but too wide).

The fan with the two outer stitches taken out looked better, as did some lazy daisies with a straight stitch underneath. Yes, I can definitely see this working!

Back to the big tulip. But before I show you the finished article I’ll write a bit more about the process of creating this tulip, and like Julie Andrew I’ll start at the very beginning – the photograph on which my canvas design is based.

Right from the start I’d envisaged this tulip (for some reason I think of him as George) in a diagonal couched stitch. Fortunately, as I’ve come to realise after looking through several canvaswork books, you can do pretty much anything and there will be a name for it, including half a dozen variations by adding “vertical”, “horizontal”, “double”, “lengthened” and so on. The stitch I had in mind could be covered by “diagonal Bokhara couching”, “web stitch” or “Italian couching”. The idea was to couch long diagonal stitches in other colours, varying the placement and density of the couching stitches to create the shading. Because of the very dark shadow on the bottom left, I started out with a burgundy Caron Watercolours couched in equally burgundy Needlepoint Inc stranded silk.

After a while I added some lighter red couching stitches to create the curved shadow, then changed the foundation thread to an orangy-red shade of Watercolours couched in two shades: densely couched, four-strand burgundy, and two-strand red which became more widely-spaced after a while.

As I got near to where the large petal meets the smaller one on the right, I stopped a little early, because (canvaswork being stitched from the foreground towards the back) the right-hand petal should have been stitched first. This would be done in diagonals running in the opposite direction to the main petal. I chose some lighter couching threads to replicate the lighter shade of the thin petal.

But after a while it became clear that the petal was too wide, and also that couching in two strands didn’t give the dense coverage needed to achieve the required lightness. Out came the petal, and in came five needles with different four-strand blends, applied (as closely as possible) according to the photograph. It took quite a few hours, but then the new slimline petal was done, and I could get back to the main petal.

By the way, about halfway through this tulip I decided to try clamping the slate frame in the Lowery stand instead of using my lap stand; usually I would clamp any frame on the side, but I’d seen someone clamp the top of the slate frame so I thought I’d give that a go. Well, it works very well indeed! It doesn’t even need weights on the bottom to keep it steady. Sitting facing the window I get a good light, and a view of the garden (albeit rather blurry when I’m wearing my stitching glasses).

Before tackling the final part of the main petal I filled in the horizontally couched, rather dark bit at the bottom, then the highlight at the top of the main petal was couched in, and finally the inside of the right-hand petal, in horizontal couching like the bottom bit. This was unpicked after the first five or so rows had been couched because the last stitch of the big petal, which I’d debated about for yonks as to how long it should be, turned out to be too short after all, and I couldn’t correct that while the horizontal stitches were in place. Heigh-ho, best to get it right. One hole longer made that last diagonal look much better, and then I could finish the final part.

There is one tiny bit of canvas showing between the top foundation stitch of the right-hand petal and the foundation stitches of the horizontal part, but it really isn’t feasible to remedy that by inserting more of the Watercolours thread. I will ask if it is a big problem; if so, I could perhaps sneak some silk thread underneath the foundation stitches in a camouflaging colour.

Be that as it may, the tulip is finished and I am very pleased with it. In fact I feel so chuffed that even if the rest of the piece never quite manages to do justice to the photograph, it won’t matter. This is my little canvaswork triumph

Let me start with an abject apology for not having written for a month. Somehow there were too many other things going on, and I didn’t get much stitching done. In fact, I didn’t really get any stitching done on my Canvaswork since my last class until about a week ago. Still, there’s been just about enough progress to warrant an update, especially as there has been a slight change in my attitude to the work – I call it, with severe overstatement, the SAS approach.

No, nothing too physical and exciting. Just telling myself: “Who Dares Wins”.

You see, until my fourth class last month I had sampled and charted and sampled some more, but the real canvas still lay pristine and untouched apart from the design outline. So when, my sampled bud having received the seal of approval, I realised that for some reason the charted and sampled version wouldn’t fit into the final outline, I decided not to do another sample but to dive in and make what adjustments were needed on the fly. And it seems to have worked! By the end of the class I had one complete bud on the canvas, and I was very pleased with how it turned out.

I wasn’t quite so brave about the pink tulip; I knew it needed more blending, and I wanted to try out the effect of splitting the stitches. So out came the sample cloth again. When the tutor suggested that the result was too blocky and it might look better with equal stitch lengths, I sampled a bit of that too, but although I really liked the blended look on its own, it didn’t look right for the tulip – having taken a good long look at it I decided I preferred the less regimented look of varying the stitch length. So back home it was on to some more sampling for the vertical section, to get the shading in the right places and to practice juggling multiple needles.

The shading didn’t quite work out as planned when I followed my carefully charted version; for one thing the dark section (blue arrow in the fourth picture above) was too solid, and too large. I was just about to draw on another sample outline and possibly re-chart when the SAS spirit exerted itself once again. Let’s just get that tulip onto the canvas!

Mind you, it was probably cowardice rather than bravery which spurred me on – with my fifth class coming up and precious little progress to report I just couldn’t face having to admit to the tutor that my only work over the past month was on the sample cloth… Still, it did nudge me into action, and I sat down with several needles loaded with a variety of blends, and the colour photograph next to the outline to guide my blend choices and stitch lengths. It took me two afternoons, but then I had a complete pink tulip ready to show to the tutor this Saturday.

It contains eight or so blends using two stranded cottons (Carrie’s Creations, now alas discontinued) and four stranded silks (Chameleon Threads’ Shades of Africa, an overdyed Soie d’Alger), and the stitches split into each other except where there are several petals within the vertically stitched part: in order to suggest some petal edges I kept the stitches separate there. Am I completely satisfied with it? No. The separating line should have gone a little further down on the left-hand side (green arrow), and the second-darkest blend has spread a bit too much in the centre (blue arrow). However, I don’t dislike these two things enough to unpick the whole thing, having finally dared to stitch it on the actual project.

Incidentally, I should have worked the two small diagonal bits at the top and bottom after the vertical petals, as canvaswork is stitched front to back, and those two small areas are furthest back of all the petals. But in my sample I’d found it almost impossible to tuck the stitches under the previously worked parts in a satisfactory manner, so I cheated. Don’t tell the assessors.

And here is my progress so far – not a lot, but to me it represents a challenge faced, a hurdle overcome, and the whole project now looks just that little bit less daunting. True, this module may take rather more than the usual eight classes, but I’m in no hurry. And I want to keep enjoying it.

In class I hope to tackle the big red tulip. I’ve chosen my threads: a couple of Caron Watercolours for the laid work, plus three Needlepoint Inc silks and three Victoria Clayton Hand-Dyed Fibres silk floss (like Carrie’s Creations unfortunately discontinued) for the couching. Aren’t they lovely colours to play with? Let’s see what I dare tomorrow, and what I win!

While chatting with Gary and Beth for Fiber Talk a couple of weeks ago, it came up that in spite of having had three of the eight classes allotted to my RSN Canvaswork module, I had yet to put a single stitch onto the actual canvas. I can now tell you… that this is still the case. But I did do some work on the project, which considering my complete lack of ease and familiarity with this technique I am happy to call progress even though it was mostly on paper. Especially as the work got the Lexi seal of approval .

Once again I’ve been doing very little in the way of homework, and I am still extremely reluctant to do anything on the “real” piece. But then an idea struck me. Unlike Jacobean and goldwork, canvaswork is a counted technique; this means it can be put into a chart, which in turn means I can basically work out what to stitch before stitching it, which feels very reassuring! So I set to work by my usual method of starting with pencil and squared paper and then transferring it into my stitching program. First up was the big bud which is mostly green but with some very faint red shading. First I charted the diagonal-ish columns of stitches without any reference to colour, then roughly drew in dark and light areas, and finally computer-charted it in five greens (to be made up from four shades of perle #8 in different blends) and some red. I also decided on one mostly red stitch at the top, as the photograph shows a distinct touch of colour there.

Next was the big pink tulip. That is going to have much more blending and shading in it, which I find quite challenging to get my head around. Again I started by charting the stitches (which in this case go in three different directions to visually separate the petals) without any reference to the colour, then worked out the dark and light areas and allotted colours to them in the stitching program. Because the mid to darker pinks in the program were very similar, I had to make some of the lines thinner to distinguish them from the nearest shade. It looks a bit odd but does show up where there is a change of colour (or more likely colour blend).

I did manage a little bit of actual thread-related work too: I wasn’t happy with the five shades of pink I had chosen for the tulip, which were all Carrie’s Creations overdyed stranded cotton. Lovely threads, but one of them was too variegated and the lightest shade wasn’t light enough. After a lot of rummaging through thread boxes (what a lovely relaxing activity that is!) I ditched most of my original selection, picked a new darkest shade, kept the second darkest one, and added four pinks from Chameleon Threads’ Shades of Africa range of stranded silks, from the Fynbos set (that means I now have six shades, but two of them are quite similar and I want to see which one works best on the canvas). I also tested how many strands were needed for good coverage on the diagonal stitches, and worked out that whereas the vertical ones take six strands (blue arrow), for the diagonal ones four strands will suffice (orange arrow) – five starts to be difficult to lay flat, and six definitely looks crowded.

And finally I sampled Angela’s suggestion of mixed upright double cross, with my sky thread underneath and a green over the top. For the green I used a new acquisition, a variegated sashiko thread, which is a matt cotton used in Japanese embroidery. The sky takes nine strands of silk for good coverage (canvaswork eats thread, it really does) but as this stitch has several layers crossing over each other I tried it with six, and the sashiko thread as it comes (it’s about the thickness of a full thread of stranded cotton). I like the look of it but want to try it again with just the horizontal stitch in blue, to echo the horizontal direction of the sky, and probably with more strands of silk and perhaps a double sashiko thread as there are some visible bits of canvas (orange arrows, among others).

My next class is on 20th April so I’m hoping to use the Easter weekend to get some serious sampling done – and who knows, perhaps even put in that scary first stitch…

It’s been a while since I last wrote about my Canvaswork module for the RSN Certificate, and that is partly because I am still finding my feet, even after three classes. I think my comfort zone isn’t even dimly visible on the horizon most of the time. Still, the two classes I’ve had since that previous FoF have been encouraging – the tutors appear to have faith in me even if I haven’t , which makes me feel a bit better about the whole enterprise. So what have I been doing since that frantic surge of last-minute sampling back in January?

Well, I attended a class with Helen McCook, who okayed several of my samples, such as the roof and the Turkey rug bushes; she advised stitching several samples and cutting them to different pile heights to see what would work best, keeping the bushy look but without them becoming too prominent, as they are meant to be on the horizon and should therefore recede into the background rather than push themselves forward. I did this at the next class, where Angela Bishop suggested I blend other threads besides wool into the mix, so I tried it with an anonymous green thread from my stash (blue arrow) as well as some of the vintage green silk I inherited from my mother-in-law (orange arrow); neither were very noticeable once trimmed, so I will have to try another one with more strands of silk mixed in.

The main point I took away from Helen McCook’s class was the fact that my idea of what the sky’s stitch blending should be was incorrect. I’d started sampling the stitch blending going horizontally, but it should in fact be done vertically. As Helen pointed out, in canvaswork the smallest stitches should be at the vanishing point – in my case the horizon. From there they go larger the closer you get but (and it took me a while to get my head around this) this goes not just for the foreground, it also applies to the sky! So the stitch blending in the sky should be larger stitches at the top merging into smaller at the bottom. She also felt that although the Parisian (small) and Hungarian Grounding (medium) in my sample worked well together, Victorian Step (large) had too much of a diagonal component to blend in. So I started looking for suitable large stitches with a more horizontal look, and found one called Water, which is basically random-length satin stitches. Because I wasn’t sure that that would provide enough contrast (they have to blend, but I don’t want them to be too similar) I found some others and stitched a sample of each, which I could later use to blend into the other two stitches.

The stitches were, from left to right, horizontal Milanese, Willow, Pavilion and Water. Willow immediately revealed itself as a non-starter – too blocky – but I continued with the other three to see how they would blend into Hungarian Grounding (and that in turn into Parisian), trying to make the transitions gradual so that there wasn’t a clear horizontal break between one and the other. I showed these to Angela at my third class and we agreed that the pattern in Pavilion was too strong. Water blends in beautifully and looks least stylised, but I thought it was all a bit samey, and Angela worried that it would also echo the stitches in the paving too much (of which more later), so I will most likely go with the Milanese version. It has some patterning but the lines move forward (albeit in a zigzag) rather than turning back on themselves (like the diamonds in Pavilion).

One thing I found in my two classes was that different tutors have different approaches and ideas. Helen advocated creating different “stitch languages” (so that, say, flowers are done in one set of thread types and stitches while leaves are done in other threads and stitches, which don’t overlap) while Angela at one point suggested that when using vertical Parisian for the smaller tulips near the paved area I could keep the same stitch but change to green to just make a colourful jumble of tulips and leaves. It’s a bit confusing when they do that…

Talking of tulips, I got on with those as well, the two big ones that stand out in the foreground. The pink tulip has so far been sampled in soft cotton but in the near future I must try blending the various shades of pink Carrie’s Creation overdyed stranded cotton which I’ve picked for that (so far I’ve only worked out how many strands are needed for full coverage – six, separated and recombined and used with a laying tool). I started out on the red tulip using soft cotton as well, but have since tried out threads that would work on the actual piece, and the main colour is going to be a lovely orangy red Caron Watercolours called Bittersweet. The pink tulip is going to be done in modified Florentine/Bargello, so I had to sample some standard Florentine as the assessors need to see you can do that too; and Helen suggested doing some of the petals in angled Florentine to make them more distinct from each other. When doing similar length stitches at an angle you can use whatever slant you like, but I found that with stitches of different lengths it’s easier to stick with 45 degrees, so that’s what will happen in the final version.

Another prominent shape in the foreground is a large bud on the left, which is mostly green but with a hint of red in it. I sampled this before my third class in Cashmere stitch using blended perle #8, and I really liked the look of it. The shading isn’t in the right place yet, as I had only two shades of the yellowy green (I have since bought two more…), and the single strand of red applied over the top (which Angela suggested I try, to see if it would work) looks a bit messy so I will try and blend that in while stitching the greens, but on the whole it’s probably the part I’m happiest with so far!

Then there was the paved area. One of the things the brief requires is at least two each (and Helen suggested picking three to be on the safe side) of four stitch types: horizontal, vertical, diagonal and crossed/textured. I’d intended the paving to be horizontal, but as I didn’t have many diagonal stitches yet Helen suggested using one there – she pointed out that “diagonal” includes anything slanted, so it could be as near horizontal as possible and still count as diagonal. I sampled various slants in Oblique Slav, settled on a 1 in 5 incline, then tried it in a linen thread I had lying around and didn’t like it. I then sampled it in flower thread or blomstergarn, coton à broder, and floche. Flower thread, with its unmercerised matte appearance, was the clear winner, and led to my acquiring the Danish Handcraft Guild‘s complete set. I have picked six shades that should work together well, covering the paved area’s brick-like colour as well as the rather surprising grey and almost-white in some areas.

Which bring me to one of my main stumbling blocks in this module – colour blending. In other people’s projects I noticed that in some areas the blend of, say, six threads might change composition (e.g. from 3 dark, 2 medium, 1 light to 2 dark, 2 medium, 2 light) every three or four stitches. I asked Angela how on earth you got into a stitch rhythm changing blends so often. “You don’t,” came the reply. Her tip was to load up ten or twelve needles with the various blends so at least you didn’t have to keep stopping and re-threading all the time, as there is the additional snag of incredibly high thread usage in this technique. Oh joy. So far I haven’t dared to think in any detail of the blended sky yet, but I have sampled some fuzzy threads (Madeiral Lana and Rainbow Gallery Wisper) to represent the white haze near the horizon, in one case blended with the silk used for the sky. I need to play a bit more with the proportions to get it looking quite right.

Otherwise, I have been sampling, sampling, and then sampling some more. Angela has told me to bite the bullet and actually put some stitches onto my proper canvas, but so far it hasn’t happened. The sampling has given me lots of ideas for things to use though (and some for things definitely not to use). Here are a few that made the Useful list: woven plait, fern stitch, slanted gobelin (encroaching, plain and split), brick stitch (and the decorative but less useful herringbone snowflake), upright cross & alternating continental (with a rather messy vault stitch), raised spot (three ways) & vertical Parisian, upright double cross & spot stitch (with some other odds and ends), kalem & lazy kalem (with another fern stitch).

One idea of Angela’s that I haven’t sampled yet is to use Upright Double Cross for the complex areas where the blue sky shines through the leaves on the tree – work the upright cross underneath in blue silk like the sky with the diagonal cross in green wool (or whatever I will be using for the tree) over the top. I really like that idea, and it is yet another example of the way colours can change even within stitches. One day that idea may become a natural one, for now it definitely has to be suggested to me before I see it.

Since the third class I’ve done only two more bits of sampling, a fringed pale lilac and yellow tulip for which I want to use some ribbon inherited from my mother-in-law (I haven’t quite got the look I want yet), and the wooden parts of the windmill’s sails, worked in ribbon over tent stitch. I like the way that’s come out, especially in the loose-lying version (on the right), but the one held on with stab stitches would be more secure. Still, no rush for that decision. I’m taking this module at a very sedate pace.

And finally a little update on Bruce – in response to my questions Anne Butcher, Head of Teaching, wrote a detailed reply with helpful comments, and although I specifically did not ask for a reassessment she said I should not have lost points for using S-ing, so my final score is 89% (tantalisingly and ever so slightly annoyingly 1% short of a Distinction). Upgraded Bruce & Haasje have since been framed and are waiting to be put on the wall, so I can be proud of them every day .

After my first Canvaswork class back in November I was feeling more optimistic about the endeavour, but I’m afraid my doubts returned as I was getting closer to my second class. To say that I am outside my comfort zone with this module is putting it mildly, and whether or not that was the reason I didn’t do much homework, the fact is that with less than one week to go I was feeling woefully underprepared. I managed to change my booking from 22nd to 29th January and solemnly undertook to do some serious sampling in that extra week.

By the way, just so that you don’t think I’d been completely useless over Christmas – I did do some work. I sampled some herringbone stitch in two different ways to see if I could work out a method which didn’t involve coming up underneath previous stitches, but which would still look the same (I could, the only visible difference being at the back of the work; the blue arrow points to the “by the book” version, the green arrow to my alternative). I also made a start on my colour plan, but as I wasn’t absolutely sure what the colour plan was meant to look like and how shaded the shading needed to be, I abandoned that halfway through. And I also… er, no. That was it.

In order not to feel immediately overwhelmed I started my new regime by sampling a very small roof. From the start I had envisaged it in slanted buttonhole stitch, and as it was orange and I have oodles of orange wool left from the Jacobean module, I used that. First I transferred the exact outline to my sample canvas, so I could see if the wool gave enough coverage. It did, and I really like the effect of the stitch. I later sampled it again in a slightly darker orange – I’ll decide further down the line which one to go with. (The picture also shows some outlines of bushes for later samplings.)

Next was the sky. There were two things to decide there: threads and stitch transitions. Because the sky is what we call in Dutch “strakblauw” (literally “taut” or “stretched” blue) I wanted a thread with a smooth texture, not rough or matt but not overly shiny either. And it so happens that in my stash there are two rather lovely series of blue silks, one in Caron Soie Cristale and one in Soie Alger. But there was possibly a snag – when the surface has to be fully covered, canvaswork takes a lot of thread (demonstration to follow), and I wasn’t sure whether my stash of silk would be enough. Buying more, especially of the Soie Cristale, would be difficult and would in any case mean different dye lots. But I do have a lot of DMC perle #8, and some of the blues looked quite suitable. They are more textured than silk, and a bit shinier (the silks I picked are both spun silks), but it was worth a sample.

Did I mention canvaswork takes a lot of thread? In any other embroidery that I do, perle #8 would count as a relatively chunky thread. Here it took a triple thread to get sufficient coverage. As for the texture, I wasn’t convinced, but I was going to wait and see how the silk behaved before deciding.

Soie Cristale is a 12-stranded silk, and I started out sampling with six strands. I got to use my beautiful laying tool, as getting the strands to lie parallel not only looks nicer, but also spreads the thread more. Even then six strands didn’t quite cover the canvas, so I tried again with nine, and worked a larger area to see the effect. Then I did a similar area in blended perle #8 to compare. I can tell you now that there is simply no comparison – silk it has to be! So smooth, so pretty, so lovely to work with *swoon* … Soie Cristale is on the Definite list.

One of the required items in the brief is a stitch transition, where at least two different stitches (and bear in mind that in canvaswork a “stitch” is often a particular arrangement of several stitches) have to gradually blend into each other. This means they must have some similarities to begin with, otherwise the join will be far too visible. I decided on Parisian stitch (underlined in blue), Hungarian Grounding (green) and Victorian Step (red). In spite of the interesting names, these are all arrangements of parallel straight stitches. The first two are usually worked with the stitches running vertically, so I turned them 90 degrees as I think the sky will look better with a horizontal sweep. It took a bit of pencil-and-squared-paper work to get the second transition to blend, but in the end I had something that I could present to the tutor as a feasible option.

By the way, a lot of sampling is done in just any old thread, unless you are actually trying out coverage or the way colours work together; the above transition was done using a spare ball of perle #5, and gave me the additional information that even that thickness does not cover the canvas when used horizontally (it may work diagonally, where the lines are closer together).

What else did I do before class? Ah yes, Turkey rug stitch. I want to use it for some bushes, with blended threads. I first tried it out with two (not very blendy) shades of Appleton’s, only to find that I’d forgotten how to do Turkey rug (which I first used on the bodies of two stumpwork butterflies) and was making the securing stitch too long (green arrow; the red arrow shows the correct length). Having refreshed my memory on this count, I decided to try it out in the proper threads, a blend of three shades of green Heathway Milano wool (the blend to change as a darker or lighter look is needed). As it turns out, a triple thread may be a bit too thick – after a few rows it gets difficult to see the canvas for the next one – so I’ll try one of the bushes with a double thread. I haven’t cut the loops yet, that’s another thing on the To Do list.

Finally, I transferred the two big tulips to the sample canvas and made a start on the red one. One possible stitch for this tulip is web stitch, which has diagonal stitches couched down to create a woven look. My thought is to leave out some of the rather dense couching and use the remaining couching stitches to create shading, partly by working them in a different colour from the diagonals, and partly by spacing them further apart when the shading needs to be lighter. Because I’d been working on Bartram the Bayeux ram, almost without thinking I stitched the diagonals as laid work (bringing the needle up right next to where you’ve taken it down so that there is hardly any thread at the back of the work) rather than satin stitch – but the Canvaswork brief, in its Tips section, advises stitchers to always take the thread the longest way round to help with tension. However, that really takes an awful lot of thread, and with all the couching stitches would make the back quite bulky. I put it down as something to ask the tutor.

And that’s the point I’d got to when it was time to gather all my frames and hoops and bits and bobs to go to class! But more about that in another FoF.