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.

After Bruce (yes, there will be an “after Bruce”, and not too far in the future with any luck) the next module for my RSN Certificate is Canvaswork. Surprisingly, even though I haven’t officially started, it’s already been through quite a few ups and downs. First of all I didn’t think I’d do it at all; I just wanted to do Jacobean and Goldwork (and even the Jacobean was mainly because they wouldn’t let me do Goldwork without it). Then I got the various RSN stitch guides and thought it might be rather fun to do Canvaswork after all, especially as some ancient seaside scribbles led to ideas for a possible design.

I liked it. I still do. It may one day make it to canvas. But unfortunately it doesn’t fit the Canvaswork brief, which specifies “depth and perspective”. A pity, because not only did I have some photographs from a visit to an aquarium in Brittany some years ago with weird and wonderful and usable creatures, but I’d also had a bit of a splurge on seaside-y textured threads. Fortunately some of these have since come in handy in other projects, for example in Septimus the Septopus.

Keeping the need for perspective in mind, I was tempted by a picture I took at Buckler’s Hard in the New Forest of some oystercatchers foraging. But in order to make them big enough to be both recognisable and stitchable I’d have to zoom in so much that most of the background, and with it any perspective, was lost. Exit the oystercatchers.

Now from the first two modules you may have gathered that I like having some personal touches in my Certificate projects; beyond the fact that I’ve designed them, I mean. Our very own pussycat made it into the Jacobean project together with references to a favourite poem, Dutchness, and my mother. Bruce and Haasje carry memories of my favourite cuddly toy and a favourite aunt’s bedtime stories. What to put into Canvaswork? Well, there is a place which is very special to me and which, before moving to England, I would visit every year; where I got engaged; and which I remember going to with many special people like my mother, several aunts, and my in-laws: the Keukenhof, that famous Dutch bulb garden. And with its swathes of flowers, trees, ponds, fountains, sculptures and buildings surely there must be suitable scenes with plenty of depth and perspective. This one, for example, which I took myself some years ago:

Very pretty, I’m sure you’ll agree, and it’s got the different textures of flowers, path and trees, but there may just be a bit too much going on in it. Canvaswork is by its very nature rather more chunky than the other techniques, and it might be challenging to capture all the detail. Moreover, I decided that if I was going to celebrate my Dutch heritage in canvaswork, I was going to go all out. Not just tulip overload, but also a windmill. And the Keukenhof just happens to have a pretty good one .

Three of these pictures come from the Facebook page of a travel organisation that specialised in Keukenhof trips, so the first thing to do was ask for their permission to use one of them. They were extremely kind about it and said yes, take your pick, just send us a picture of the embroidery when it’s finished. I warned them that might be a while…

As for which to choose, well, all four have a lot going for them: perspective, different textures and lines, and some large areas in which to show off stitch transitions. They all have their drawbacks too – the first has lots of people and other “cluttery” things like bins and benches in it and the sky is overexposed; the middle two haven’t got the curvy sweep of flowers which draws you into the picture; and the last one again has rather a lot of clutter, and it’s in landscape orientation, which doesn’t fit my small frame quite so well. I may try cropping that one to portrait orientation, getting rid of some of the undesirable elements at the same time (although I’d still have to ask the tutor whether I’d be allowed to ignore that one rather prominent rubbish bin). And in spite of the lack of sweep, I like the third picture because it is nice and bold and hasn’t got too much fiddly detail. Anyway, I’m taking all these pics to class, so in between mounting Goldwork we’ll discuss which one is most likely to work. I’ll let you know!