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.

My last update on the RSN Canvaswork module stopped at a slimmed-down tulip, with the promise of leaves to come before class. Well, somewhat to my own surprise they did! Two of them, both in satin stitch. The first one I was going to stitch exactly as sampled, with the two halves of the leaf in vertical and horizontal satin stitch. In order to have no canvas showing I made sure to tuck the stitches in the second half neatly underneath the stitches in the first half, which also made for a rather effective leaf vein. Unfortunately horizontal and vertical stitches do create a different edge, and I was slightly worried whether the bump caused by the transition from one to the other would be frowned on. Fortunately the tutor, Kathryn, said that I was ending everything in the same line of holes, as I should, and the bump is the natural consequence of the nature of the stitches, which the assessors allow for.

The next leaf, or rather two leaves that sort of blend into each other, had a stem to contend with. As instructed I had stitched the stem first as it is further towards the front in the design; and I quickly found that working the diagonal satin stitch into the holes directly next to the stem would not do. There was canvas showing, so that meant more tucking, a lot of it, and in some awkward positions! On the left-hand side it meant coming up at an angle from underneath the big pink tulip, trying not to disturb its stitches, and going down at an angle underneath the short and therefore rather tight stitches of the stem. All this while juggling three or four needles holding different thread blends.

Still, the end result was worth it I think, especially once I’d added a thin hightlight on the right. I asked Kathryn about that and she said although generally shading and colour changes had to be achieved within the canvas stitches, an occasional outline stitched over the top was fine, especially when the width of the colour in question is so small that any stitch over a canvas thread would be too wide. I also remarked to her that although I realised the reasoning behind the back-to-front rule, it would have been so much easier to have done this the other way round! To which she replied that sometimes there were exceptions to the rule… Hmm, I could have done with that insight a bit earlier!

To be fair, that usually applies to things like ribbon stitches done over the surface of previous stitches, which is how the very small tulips overlapping the paving in my photograph will be done. But it’s good to know one can occasionally interpret the rules creatively.

Another thing I’d managed before class was a tiny bud. I did get slightly carried away with the possibilities of blending, ending up with four blends of five shades of Madeira silk in four stitches. Still, it makes for a nice bud .

Finally I sampled two variations of rose leaf stitch, a complicated one involving a crochet hook and a simpler one, both worked over a piece of stiff paper, both interesting, and neither in the least usable in my design. The combination of blue silk and green chenille thread I sampled in class for the lacy tree against the sky didn’t even have the distinction of looking interesting – the chenille was too bulky and just looked messy, besides shredding like mad. Oh well, you don’t know unless you try.

In class it was interesting to get Kathryn’s fresh view of my project, as she hadn’t seen it before. It was decided I would tackle some green stuff in the afternoon, but first I would work the pointy tulip. Split gobelin in three directions because two of the petals in the photograph have quite strong diagonal lines, with no splitting along the petal edges. Two petals which in the picture blend into each other were to be treated as one petal. Kathryn wasn’t sure I’d be able to get in the very thin light edge on the left-hand petal, but I thought if I started the stitching from that edge in a light shade and then split into it with a darker shade, it would produce something nearly narrow enough so that it wouldn’t need another outline stitch. I didn’t sample this tulip but worked it straight onto the main canvas, blending five shades of Silk Mill silk and one of Madeira as I went. The last two pictures show the finished tulip under different lighting conditions; what a difference that can make in a photograph!

I will get to the green stuff, but first let’s talk stems for a bit. When stitching the most prominent tulip stems, one had got overlooked – or perhaps I’d temporarily ignored it because unlike the others it was at an angle. Time to remedy that, as with a bit of compensation the brick stitch used for the other stems would work here as well. I started out with the same blend of five strands of dark green with one burgundy and one dark flesh, but that was too red compared to the photograph, so I took out the dark flesh and put in another green. Much better. Unfortunately this did show up the stem of the large bud on the left; it’s quite a different colour, which is fine because that reflects the photograph, but the long satin stitches don’t quite fit in. They are, as Kathryn pointed out, rather too long to be approved of without couching, but couching would break up the long lines I was after. And if those long lines were going to be broken up anyway, I might as well do this stem in the same brick stitch as the other stems and create what is known as a “stitch language” for stems throughout the piece. So one of my homework assignments is to unpick that stem and redo it it, possibly in the perle cotton used for the satin stitch, possibly in something stranded; we’ll see.

Right, leafy stuff. Having been on this particular module for some time now, Kathryn is the fourth tutor I’ve had, and she offered a fourth view (after Angela’s and the two Helens’) on the jumble of green among the tulips. Sigh. She said she quite understood I was beginning to get sampling fatigue, but she was worried that the double upright cross which I’d sampled as the largest of the three jumble patterns (as suggested by one of the Helens) would be too bulky, and would look as though it was in front of the large leaves it was surrounding instead of retreating into the background. She also felt that three different stitches was too much of a good thing. There was a stitch she couldn’t remember the name of that was really good for grasses and so on, and which could possibly be stitched on two different scales – then I would be able to do the whole jumble in what was effectively one stitch, giving coherence to it, while varying the colours to add highlights to the texture. While I stitched my pointy tulip and stem, Kathryn leafed (pun intended) through various canvas stitch books, and finally came up with the rather splendidly named Triple Cross Encroaching.

I sampled this in some variegated shashiko thread, at the original size and smaller. The shashiko thread was too thick for the smaller version, which incidentally is relatively narrower than the original size because although the foundation cross stitch can be reduced from over-four to over-two, the slanted stitches only stick out beyond the cross by one canvas thread in the original, which can’t be reduced any further. Still, they both make interesting patterns. I then sampled them in one ply of Caron Watercolours (original size) and one thread of Caron Wildflowers (reduced version), with lighter stitches worked in to see whether that could be used to create highlights. These light stitches will need to be placed a bit more randomly and I can also play with working the stitch upside down, but it looks promising; and the idea of doing the whole green chaos in variations of one stitch definitely appeals!

And that’s where I am at the moment. My next class is at the end of September, but with several busy weekends coming up I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to do. Kathryn went through various of my samples for large leaves with me and we decided on the ones that would likely work best, so I will at least try to get the big leaves in the foreground stitched. And I might sneak in a bit of mill, just for a change…

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…