Block shading | Flights of Fancy

Tomorrow is my 6th Certificate class, and I have done my homework. Most of it. Some of it. I have finally realised that my estimates of what I will get stitched between classes is ludicrously optimistic so I will just be pleased with whatever bits I managed. For this class they are, in order, a snail, a leaf, a water sample, and part of a hillock.

I wrote about James the Snail in as much detail as anyone is likely to want in an earlier FoF, but I will just show him again here because I’m chuffed to bits with him!

I shouldn’t have started with James, really; he is definitely the crowning glory of the piece so far, so all the other parts will have a hard time living up to him. Heigh-ho, I’m afraid you’ll just have to be disappointed .

Next up was the leaf on the right of the tree, which was going to have scattered ermine stitches in the centre. “Scattered” implies “random”, a concept I have had to work on. I am inherently a symmetry nut, so I fully understand people who panic at a workshop when being told to “apply beads at random”. For those people (and for myself, when I’m not in a random mood) I generally provide one non-random pleasing pattern, and one way of being random in an organised manner. The latter method was the one I adopted for the leaf.

That meant drawing the ermine stitches on my sample cloth and stitching them there (also to see whether I could get all five shades of turquoise in – I could!), then tracing them, deciding that some of them needed to be moved, pricking the tracing with those necessary movements in mind, and using the pricked tracing to put guide dots on the fabric.

Drawing the ermine stitches on the sample cloth

By this method I managed to resist the temptation to put all the ermine stitches in a regimented symmetrical pattern. I still feel the urge to unpick and move some of them to look less random, but I’m ignoring it. This is my scattered leaf!

You may remember the tutors and I couldn’t quite work out what to call the stitch I was going to use for the border – it wasn’t brick stitch, because it would be worked in long lines instead of rows, but it was bricked. However, I wasn’t sure how consistently I’d be able to keep up the bricking because of the very curvy and pointy bits of the shape I was filling. So we decided on “backstitch filling”, which covered all bases. Compensating for the curves and for the fact that the border isn’t equally wide all around was a bit tricky here and there, and my stitch length definitely isn’t uniform around the leaf, but I’m happy with the overal look of it.

Incidentally, as I was editing the close-up photograph I’d taken of the finished leaf I noticed something I hadn’t seen while working on it: a visible bit of painted outline. Although it is sometimes possible to very gently scrape the paint off the fabric, it seemed a better idea to put in a few extra stitches – it would smooth out the outline at the same time as covering the paint. Fastening on and off was a bit fiddly with no suitable areas nearby, but I managed to sneak them underneath existing stitches to keep them invisible.

As it is really only possible to work on the actual project by daylight, I put in a little sampling on Saturday evening. Along the bottom of the hillocks there will be a few lines of waves worked in fly stitch couching. Previous samples (not for the Certificate) had been in fairly rigid lines, but I wanted to experiment with lines that would vary in height along their length, and possibly also have an undulating couched line (originally I had intended the v-shapes of the fly stitches to represent the waves, while keeping the lines they were couching straight). As I had a sample cloth with the left-hand hillock on it, I stitched a bit of sea/river along the bottom, and although the fly stitches are perhaps a little higher than I’ll make them in the proper piece, I like the effect of the wavy lines – they are definitely in!

I had hoped to finish both the block shading and the Bayeux stitch floral element, but I could see that wasn’t going to happen. I settled for two-thirds of the block shading (well, it’s more than that actually as the rows get progressively shorter and I’ve done the two longer ones). The first thing I had to decide on was the corners of my rows. The RSN Crewel book shows block shading with straight edges – that is to say, the very first and the very last stitch of the row are horizontal and cover the full height of the row. But my corners are much sharper than the ones in the picture, and it would mean having a sort of fan of stitches there in order to get from the horizontal to the proper stitch angle for the rest of the arc. My worry was that that would get bulky where the fanning stitches met, so I worked some slightly shorter stitches instead, keeping the direction of the stitches near the corner.

I bounced this off Angela and she said that was the right way to go about it, so on with the rest of the row. Having completed it I was quite happy with it! The top edge is smooth, the corners are neat, the stitches aren’t crowded (something Angela had asked me to concentrate on), the stitch direction changes gradually, and – yay! – the row is virtually the same width all along (unlike my earlier samples).

Unfortunately, because of the nearly horizontal position of the slate frame, I see the work at an angle, and wool stitching having quite a bit of body, that means I can’t actually see the fabric right by the far side of my stitches unless I lean over, which is not a very good stitching position. It meant that I didn’t notice until I was about two-thirds of the way through that the teensiest bit of design line is visible at the top of the hillock. A bit of a dilemma, as this will cost me points in the assessment; on the other hand a dilemma that wasn’t too hard to solve – I’d just produced the larger part of a very respectable-looking row of block shading and there was no way I was going to unpick it all! The risk of ending up with a row that covered the paint line but looked much less nice than this one was too big. It’ll have to stand.

In between work I found time to complete the second row of shading, with some tricky voiding for the ball of wool; the third row (a light brown) will have to be done at the class, and hopefully that Bayeux leaf as well. For now, this is the state of the Tree at the start of my sixth class:

Two months between my fourth and fifth RSN Certificate classes – surely I must have finished at least three-quarters of the tree by now? Well, not quite. But I have done a lot of sampling, and some “proper” work too, with a few more parts to follow this week with a bit of luck (and application). One of the things I sampled is the ball of wool which entangles the cat. Having decided to work my brick in straight satin stitch, this will be where I show off satin stitch that is both slanted and padded.

First I made a few sketches of the various options, and eventually I decided on a split stitch outline and padding top left to bottom right (surface satin stitch so it doesn’t create too much bulk at the back), then a complete layer of satin stitch in the darkest shade of turquoise bottom left to top right, and finally an incomplete layer like a band in the middle using the second darkest shade, again from top left to bottom right. And when I stitched it, it actually looked as I had envisaged it! Very encouraging – usually it takes at least a few goes. This may of course mean that the one on the actual Certificate piece is going to be disappointing, but let’s remain optimistic.

Second, incomplete layer of satin stitch

I like having that ball of wool in the design. The Anglo-Saxon word for it is “cleow” (very close to the present-day Dutch “kluwen”) which is said to be the origin of the term “crewel”. How cool to have a crewel cleow .

Next was a couple of sketches for the gap in the tree trunk; Angela had expressed concern that Cretan stitch over the full width of the gap, especially towards the bottom, would be too wide. How to divide it? My idea was to sample one version in three parts, from shaded from medium to lightest turquoise, and another in two parts, with dark shades on the light side of the tree and light shades on the dark side, to create the illusion of a deep hollow in the tree which is just picked out by the light coming from the right.

The three-part version turned out to be too fussy at the top; I like the look of the dark/light version better, although even there the Cretan stitch looks remarkably like feather stitch at the top where it can’t spread out. But then lots of stitches are really the same thing with only minor variations, so perhaps that shouldn’t surprise me. One question remains: does it need the extra outline I had originally put in my plan? Perhaps I could just whip the chain stitches that border it already. I’ll bounce that off the tutor on Saturday.

On to block shading; I obviously need practice on that (see my previous report) plus I had to try out colours. I like the bold version on the left, but on consideration decided that a lighter version would show up the ball of wool better. The sample on the right uses two browns because the lighter one looked too light on the skein, but it turned out to look better when stitched – so the colour combination on the far right is the one I’ll go with. As for the block shading itself, it’s definitely getting better but I just can’t seem to keep the bands the width I set out with. It’s exasperating! I will have to draw really clear guidelines and stick to them like glue.

Finally I managed to do some proper stitching on the actual embroidery: the two large leaves at the bottom of the tulip flower, to be worked in long & short stitch. You may remember from my report about the September class that Jessica Aldred gave her official blessing to what I’d been doing in long & short stitch all along, which was encouraging, so without any further sampling I got on with the Real Thing – split stitch outline in medium (except where they meet the tulip, as there will be later stitching along those lines), and then fill in from the tip in lightest to the base in darkest turquoise.

Split stitch outline and first shade of long and short filling

Incidentally, all these photographs are upside down because I’m working with the top end of the frame towards me at the moment – I simply can’t reach the top of the design when the frame is the right way round!

Having finished the leaves I decided last Saturday to forgo my usual Ladies’ Walk (it looked like rain anyway…) and spent three solid hours on my Certificate homework, in spite of someone in the neighbourhood using some sort of machinery which emitted a continuous droning noise for the first 90 minutes or so. My tulip bulbs may be languishing in the garden shed instead of being planted, but this tulip was going to be completed!

Having seen effect of the dense turquoise stitching on the leaves, the colour of the frills on the petals decided itself: brown. As with the leaves I decided against sampling, plunged for medium brown for the buttonhole/blanket stitch and dark (not darkest) brown for the detached buttonhole fringe, and got stitching.

The last part of the tulip was the dark orange outline, which according to my stitch plan was to be done in knotted stem stitch (also known as Portuguese stem stitch). I had second thoughts; the lines surrounding the brown battlement couching should, I felt, be like the lines surrounding the turquoise lattice work – plain stem stitch. Fortunately it is a doddle to change from plain to knotted stem stitch and back again within a single line, without any need for fastening off and on again, so I decided to work the bits around the brown central petal in plain, and then switch to knotted once I was clear of that part.

No. Absolutely no. It just looks fussy, and with so much going on in that flower already, the outlines need to be clean and simple and not distract the eye. So unpick the knotted bit, discard the unpicked thread because it did not stand up well to this, fasten on a new one and complete the outline in plain stem stitch all around.

And here is the whole thing, right way up – I hope to complete at least the left-hand hillock (and possibly the brick) before Saturday’s class.

PS Don’t forget you can sign up for that other Tree of Life from this coming Friday!

Flights of Fancy

Mabel's musings on anything stitchy

Tag Archives: Block shading

Certificate progress

More sampling, a block shading lament and a finished tulip