One of my defining characteristics as a stitch dilettante is that whenever things get stressful I have a tendency to start a new project with string – often in a technique I’ve never tried before.

Things I’ve learned this way include: needle tatting, needlelace, reticella, pulled work, drawn work, lace knitting, and thread crochet. Add to this the fact that I’ll also start a new project just to try out something new, or because I like the “pretty picture,” and you can see how I might end up with unfinished rugs, ornaments, pillows, cafe curtains, and more tucked into nooks and crannies all over the house.

Last year was especially stressful, with my Dad passing, and my husband fially recovering from a fight with lyme disease or Starry, or whatever they’ve decide to call tick-borne diseases in Carolina, because we all know deer ticks won’t cross the Mason-Dixon line. (Sorry. That’s another rant.)

Rather than starting new techniques last year, though, I became a designing fiend. And I drew a lot – filled many sketchbooks with small doodles that really only belong in the trash can. I played in mixed media – how do you feel about mixed  media cross stitch designs?

And I actually started finishing my UFOs from those nooks and crannies – especially the knitting. And I started slipping out into the world more – in January I found that two of my designs had made it onto the pages of the Nordic Needle catalog – the printed one!

This year I feel in a much better position to keep moving on into the world.  It will be an adventure.

And my announcement. I am now accepting commissions for custom embroidery designs. If you ever had an idea that you thought you wanted to stitch but couldn’t draw, we can work something out. I can even kit the project for you when it’s all designed! Freestyle, crewel, stumpwork, cross stitch. Let’s talk!

Lucinda in the Rose Garden - the first design I created

I have a confession. It may seem strange coming from a cross stitch designer, but while I really love designing cross stitch, as I get older, I’m finding myself stitching less and less of it. This isn’t to say that I don’t still love it. In fact, last week I found myself very pleased with the meditative qualities I remembered while stitching a new pillow design (and boy did I need those meditative qualities at the time!)

For me, counted cross stitch was a gateway drug. It was the thing that got me beyond the hatred of that stamped cross and stem stitch sampler I started when I was six and only finished at 12 because I wanted to learn crewel, and my mother insisted that I finish EVERY project before starting another one (even if even SHE couldn’t figure out the instructions for the turkeywork stitch on that second crewel piece I tried…).

I taught myself counted cross stitch in the mid-80s for two reasons. One, I couldn’t find a crewel kit on the shelves to save my life. And second, I still had a bit of trepidation about starting a new crewel pattern when I hadn’t finished that first one.

My first cross stitch project was a little 18th century man with a no-smoking sign. I was hooked. My second… Theresa Wentzler’s Fantasy sampler. (And just to make Mom roll over in her grave, I’ll admit here and now that I STILL haven’t’ finished the thing, even though I love it and  want it on my wall.) People have told me that I didn’t finish it because it was too complicated for a first project. If that were the case I would have gone back to it, knuckled down and finished it later. No, I didn’t finish it because it still makes my eyes cross with all those blended threads! I’ve learned a lot about design from those projects that I haven’t finished, and I went on to start my own line… which kind of sidetracked me from stitching other people’s designs. The image above is of the very first design I ever created myself, with a link to the pattern purchase page. I’m about to send her companion, Talieson in the Rose Garden off to my model stitcher! Finally.

There are still three pieces by other people in my workbox: That Fantasy Sampler, Ink Circles Cirque des Cercles, and Indigo Rose’s Millennium Sampler, which is now hard to find. (There are more in the UFO box… But I’ll rotate those in later.) I do take a few stitches on them once in a while, which means that they will get finished at some point… but it’s not going to be soon.

And you can expect more than cross stitch from Golden Circle in the coming months/years.  Now, back to stitching that newest cross stitch model of mine…! (psst – it’s another pillow!)

I make a solid Cinderella, if not a traditional one!

There was a time when our bellydance troupe was just starting in its new incarnation when we just wanted to improve. Perfect what we could do, do more,  and do it the best we could. This is still part of our philosophy- we all want to improve. But there came a time when we realized that we weren’t having fun any more. And hey, we started learning this dance form for fun, didn’t we? It was an issue of taking ourselves too seriously.

So we changed. We changed our format to “raks wacky” from traditional raks sharki, and since have done routines like The Disney Princesses Compete on So you Think You Can Dance…. We teamed up with another local  troupe and became the bellydancing Elvii to Everyone’s got a little Elvis in Them. (There’s a photo HERE although we haven’t bothered with the blog at all… oops). We’ve done a version of the Evolution of Dance, and yes, even a bellydance strip tease to You can Leave your Hat On from the Full Monty, (down to thermal underwear with pasties!) which prompted a “name” in the industry to tell us “you’ve set bellydance back 20 years. And it was hilarious.”  Our goal was to bring the fun back to our performances. Now, I still perform and teach traditional sets – and you have to know the foundations well to do something like this. But I’m seeing yet another crossover with needlework, and I don’t like it.

What I mean is this – I talk to younger people that I see stitching, and ask them why they don’t go into the needlework shops. The answer is quite often the same. not that they don’t carry supplies they could use, or new techniques they’d like to learn. It’s rather because the people who have been stitching for ages all either don’t offer suggestions, OR, and I think this might be an important key – we tend to have definite ideas about how things should be done. There is One right way. um… no. It goes back to my experience as a young stitcher who was exploring medieval techniques back in college. The store – which specialized in cross stitch, wanted me to be stitching on aïda, with no thought that I might be doing a technique that required something else… or that I might be experimenting. Or that experimenting was good. After all, you just followed the chart and it all worked out, right? (Note: People in modern fabric stores don’t like to be told that they didn’t have modern interfacing in the Middle Ages, either…)

SO. How do we move past the “this is serious art and we must be serious” stage and back into the “this is fun and experimentation and shouldn’t be tedious” stage. Yeah, stitching a 22 inch Victorian doily completely in silk shading can get tedious. But what about that ipod cozy? Or the pocket on that denim jacket you’ve had forever?  I want to encourage kids and young adults to have fun with this art form. To find their own way, whether it’s learning the techniques of the past or taking it in a direction that it’s never been before.  I have a tendency to start big, complicated projects and take years and years to finish them (Part of that is that there are always MULTIPLE big, complicated projects in progress.) This coming year I’m going to try to infuse more fun into my stitching, over the top of the meditative quality I tend to have, and that comes from the big, monotonous complicated projects. The shower curtain is a start to that. It’s hard to be a complete perfectionist when the small stitches are almost a quarter inch long!

Someone said about the troupe’s last performance, “Just what we’ve come to expect from you ladies – clean dancing with a fun and innovative theme. Very entertaining.”

Clean, fun and entertaining. I can’t think of a better compliment to receive. On my dancing, on my stitching, my teaching, on the designs I present for other people to stitch.

Be creative.

I hope that my free 5 part e-course has helped some of you use cross stitch charts in a new and fun way.  If you  don’t know what I’m talking about, you can sign up for the course and my sporadic newsletter here.

Remember to Have Fun.

While working on the overhaul of the studio last week (I’ll post pictures in progress later – it’s actually coming along!) I was going through the bookshelves and happened to actually open and glance through one of my Erica Wilson books (realizing that I now have three different titles!). Anyway. In the midst of this wonderful old book (Needleplay) I found… instructions for transferring large designs for wallhangings.  It’s a method I have never seen anyplace else, and it worked like a charm!

In Sharpie, on net.

The gist of it is, use a permanent marker to trace your pattern onto net or tulle fabric (I used petticoat net, because the holes are bigger and the design was VERY large). Then lay or pin the net to the fabric, and trace the design again. I used the micron graphic pen, because micron ink doesn’t seem to bleed or fade when it gets wet…

It worked like a charm on the test pattern (which if it works will become the cafe curtain for the bathroom where the shower curtain lives.  The extra lines you see in the flower are there because I tried to trace it using a window/light box first and failed miserably, despite the fact that you CAN see through the fabric, it just wasn’t working for me. The design transferred beautifully using the net, and I will use it for the shower curtain! Hurrah for no tracing, AND no prick and pouncing!!!

This is about 18 inches of the center of the design (it really IS straight on grain - the photo's slanted!)

Note: Because the net is nylon, while the sharpie that I used to trace the original design onto IT doesn’t bleed, the micron pen came off the net and onto my hands while I was tracing onto the fabric. I soon learned to use a piece of scrap paper over already traced areas to avoid this. (Old calligraphy trick.)

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.

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?

Precious Kitty!

It’s something you sometimes hear in art circles –  “Don’t get too precious” “Don’t be precious about it!” “Keep your work fresh, not precious.” Precious connotes perfectionism – sometimes overworking, sometimes underworking a piece in order to get it “just so.” For some reason, this is considered bad. (I’m a perfectionist…) But who am I to talk? When a friend complained about a town being too “twee,” I said, but I LOVE that town! (I also never told her that I was planning ot move there… and in fact, I didn’t – I fell in love and moved 2500 miles away instead!) maybe “precious” is in my blood.

You don’t hear the word precious thrown around in American needlework circles very often – sometimes I’ll hear it in the more avant-garde UK textile forums.  I have, however, have had acquaintances tell me that American stitchers tend to replace creativity in design with perfect craftsmanship. Indeed, needlework kits feel the need to underscore “the back should look as good as the front.” And there is a fear here that someone will turn over your work and analyze the back… (I do, but not for neatness… I want to know HOW they did what they did!!)

Note on the photo – I’ve never met a cat named Precious that wasn’t psychotic and scary. Dora is NOT named precious, but she has the nickname of The Cuteness… does that count?

I’m not sure where I’m going with this ramble. So let me ask y’all a question – are spontaneity and craftsmanship deadly enemies? Can we have spontaneous, fresh design and still keep quality of stitching? Can stitching be taken into the “real art” world without sacrificing this?

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!!!

Liberty Sofa Cover Design

So, I decided to go ahead with a new shower curtain — we’ve been talking about going gothic in the hall bathroom – gothic the time period, not gothic the lifestyle, although there is some overlap there….

Really, it’s going to end up being a Victorianesque pastishe of the medieval period, which is fine by me. A long time ago I started stitching a shower curtain that inluded a border of German Brickstitch work. That border broke me. There’s no way I’ll finish it!

What I have decided to do instead is based on last week’s post, and a Victoran design from an old book from Liberty of London. The original was designed for a sofa cover – 36 inches by 62 inches. I printed it out from the catalog at just under 8 1/2 by 11, and am currently enlarging it using the old fashioned grid method to 42 X 63 inches, which will fit our tub nicely. I think eitehr the reproduction scan was skewed, or I stretched it in printing, because I can’t get the ratios to work out to what the catalog says the original is, but I don’t think it matters TOO much.

There is a nice heavy plainweave linen on order from fabrics-store.com, and I am going to attempt this in washable sock yarn from Knitpicks.

I’ll walk through this project as I go, although it’s not high on the priority list for finishing right now, but it is a lot of fun to plan!

I’m still contemplating the Art Nouveau piece — I’ve traced it to size, and simplified for stitching, but I’m still debating fabric choices! I thought I had picked out the one I wanted to use – a nice, soft black cotton that I had on hand, but now I’m not sure again. I’m wondering if something a bit smoother might go better.  <sigh> When the right fabric jumps out at me I’ll know and be able to start work for real.