08.27.10
Posted in General at 7:00 am by deRomilly
Liberty Sofa Cover Design
The great shower curtain (which I’m now considering prick and pounce for transferring after all… ) is a Victorian variation on the tree of life pattern that became so popular in Renaissance needlework.
No one is really sure whether European needlework influenced middle eastern and Indian woven textiles that were imported, or whether it was the other way around. Like so many things in history, the truth is probably that they influenced each other, and both developed because of it.
Often at the bottom of these designs live lions and lambs in harmony, hunters chasing deer as a symbol of the human journey (no harmony there!) and every other emblem and symbol the Jacobean embroiderer could fit in — these were the people who sewed rebuses into the hems of their dresses, after all! (I’ll look up my reference for that later…. it’s in a book upstairs in the extremely hot studio (the AC still not fixed… we’re getting there, slowly!)
I’m partial to the quiet little plant-ridden hillocks on the bottom of this design. Although I might be tempted to slip in a rabbit (or squirrel) if my husband isn’t watching.
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08.25.10
Posted in General at 7:00 am by deRomilly
Choreography? 
They have a lot in common, really. Kind of surprising on the surface, but not so much as you dig deeper. Everything has a structure, and physicists are finding that mathematically, everything is related.
I’ve been playing with stitches in crewelwork lately. Often I fall back on old standards that I know work, because they have for centuries – long and short stitch, satin, chain stitch, stem stitch, the occasional french or colonial knot. Blanket stitch and I don’t get along particularly well if I’m not covering wire, and I’ve just recently re-discovered a love for Palestrina knots.
Repetition and Variation
I got to thinking about how similar placing stitches into a design is to placing dance steps in a choreography. The same design rules apply. You need repetition to make sure that your viewer doesn’t get overwhelmed or lost — it creates a safe place – and you need variation or it gets boring quickly.
In dance, we call it the “rule of four.” It takes four repetition for a viewer to get to the “Yeah, OK, I’ve seen that” point – so you can change it up with a bit of surprise on the fourth repetition – 3 hip circles and a figure 8 with the hips for example (or three 8s and a big circle, for that matter…) I can achieve an undulating flow by alternating moves, a-b, a-b, or hip snap, circle, hip snap, circle.
Click for larger image
And this is applicable to needlework, too! (Really – watch me!)
For example, you can use color as in the top wing feathers here – red/blue, red/blue. Or in stitches – stem stitch filling, chain, stem, chain. I did the latter on the bottom wing, with a subtle color addition, too. (And note that the top feather is the equivalent of the 4th rep variation ( it’s a raised stem stitch right now… but I’m considering ripping it out and making it plain stem stitch… it just seems jarring.)
The trellis work grid pattern on the leaves provides repetition and the size change gives it variation.
How do you use repetition and variation? Even if all you do is geometric cross stitch designs, do you ever replace a color with beads? Use more than one color?
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08.16.10
Posted in General at 1:26 pm by deRomilly
Sock Yarn for embroidery!
My yarn for the test stitching for the shower curtain came on Saturday (ordered it from Knitpicks, and it always arrives so fast)! I am a very happy camper. I only messed up color wise on about three skeins, so I can work on looking that up. I decided to work up a cafe curtain in a similar design to use on the window, and to test out the stitching – it will give me the opportunity to test stitches, and see how much thread I’m really going to need without guessing. One of the catches to using sock yarn is that because it isn’t designed for embroidery, colors change seasonally. Sometimes drastically!
The colors that don’t work in this pile are pretty obvious, the bright yellow on the right, and the very light blue at the bottom. There are two other blues that are too close together in shade… if I can find one in between, the light blue might work after all…
So now I’m off to transfer the smaller cafe curtain design to the fabric and start playing! Yay!!! (oh, wait. There’s other work that needs to be done first. Darn real life!)
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08.11.10
Posted in Stitching Genres at 7:00 am by deRomilly
Crewel Bird...
While I’m finishing up the design work for the big huge shower curtain project from the depths of my over-commitment (yes, I’m getting cold feet… a little!), I’ve been working on this little bird – he’s 8 inches or so tall, and so far worked in long and short stitch. I’m sure there will be other stitches soon, but I do tend to lean towards the simple, effective use of a few stitches, despite my love of the baroque!
He comes from an old Dover iron-on transfer book Jacobean Crewel Embroidery. (It looks like this is out of print these days…)
He’s being stitched on cotton canvas, and I’m doing him in the Paternayan tapestry wool I’ve had in the cupboard for years. He’d fit in in the new bathroom, but won’t be remotely washable. Maybe I’ll actually make him into yet another pillow (I seem to have gone pillow-happy since I broke my fear of making them…)
A Bird in the hoop...
Interesting slant on things
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08.09.10
Posted in Stitching Genres at 11:18 am by deRomilly
The linen for the shower curtain arrived Thursday, astonishing me with the speed of its arrival. It is, as I write this, drying after its quick trip through the washing machine.
It wasn’t quite what I expected, but I can blame myself for not ordering a swatch before I bought it — and it is very pretty in a rustic way. I may wash it a couple more times to soften it before I stitch it. Linen gets softer with use, but I don’t really want to wash the wool stitching — even washable wool – constantly.
So I have the linen, the design is being enlarged – almost 1/2 way there at this point. The leaves are about 10 to 11 inches long. I think it will be gorgeous in the heavy wool on the coarse linen.
Now I get to play with color. I haven’t ordered the yarn yet. Much fun!!!
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