Tucson Chapter ANG
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Tucson Chapter ANG |
Painted Canvas Hints |
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Hi Stitchers; The following article is from Jane in Chilly Hollow. She has given us permission to reprint and use for our Chapter. Many thanks to her. Margaret *PART ONE* It bothers me that there are so many people afraid to stitch a painted canvas. I want to help those with a painted canvas phobia, so here's my best shot at explaining how I approach embellishing. Remember, I am not a professional; this is just how I approach things. You get what you pay for; you'll learn a lot more taking a class from a nationally known teacher than listening to me! However, I know not everyone has an opportunity to take classes with the truly gifted stitchers among us. So here goes.... I eased into painted canvases by starting with small pieces and getting stitch guides for canvases so I could learn from what the very talented in this area do. More and more canvases have printed instructions you can buy as an option that will tell you what threads and stitches were used for a stitched model. You can also hire people to write stitch guides for your particular canvas but this isn't cheap. There are famous teachers who do "How to Write A Stitch Guide" classes as well. Take advantage of them if one is coming to a shop or guild near you. There are cyber classes on stitched painted canvases. Take advantage of them if you can. And read your needlepoint magazines carefully. They are full of projects that you might not want to stitch but you can always use the ideas on your own canvas some day. Tony Minieri and Amy Bunger might not be teaching in your area but you can read their columns on how to stitch clothing, water, flowers, etc. and have the benefit of their talent for your canvas. Also, ask for help at your local shop and from your stitching friends. Stitchers are very generous people and will be delighted to help. There are some books to help you. The new Needlepoint 101 by Ruth Dilts explains how to choose a painted canvas and then pick the threads and stitches for it. This is a small book with a lot of projects and pictures. Ruth explains why she picked the stitches she did for each example and lists the exact brands and colors of threads she used. You'll see before and after pictures of each painted canvas and a small glossary of diagrammed stitches. This is a very good book for beginners. However, you are not going to learn about texture, color, or how to use a variety of stitches on a large and realistic canvas in this book. That's for NP 202! Other books especially written for those embellishing canvases are the Stitches for Effect series. There are three of them (Stitches for Effect, More Stitches for Effect and Even More Stitches for Effect) plus a small summary book with just the stitch diagrams for travel. The three big books offer a lot of useful thread information in the front followed by a dictionary of diagrammed stitches that make nice snowflakes, sweaters, roads, hair, leaves, flowers, etc. You could literally look up any item you want stitches for in the back index and stitch using their recommendations. Often they will recommend a thread that works well for this stitch, too. Very useful series! Besides these books, and classes and magazine articles, there isn't much help for people who want to stitch painted canvases. You see, there aren't any hard and fast rules for stitching a painted canvas. (Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this discussion!) I have picked up a few things here and there that I'll share with you. Stitchers who are really great at this say to pick a canvas without a lot of detail to start with. A realistic canvas with lots of shading can be embellished but it is going to be a lot harder than one that looks cartoon-like with a lot of large plain areas to fill in. In other words, pick something small like this-- http://secure.theneedleworks.com/store/addProduct2.jsp?ProductId=109378 Not a large and complicated designs like these. They are gorgeous but they are going to be harder to stitch with fancy stitches-- http://www.mindysneedlepoint.com/backup_files/canvas/canvasjapanese.html This message is getting a little long so I'll end now and continue in a second message. Jane, shouting encouragement to the painted canvas phobic from Chilly Hollow *PART TWO* I think it'll be easier to talk about how to embellish a painted canvas if we have an example. This is what I've chosen--a cowgirl's outfit. <No laughing from the peanut gallery. I wanted to be Dale Evans for years. Children who don't know who Dale Evans is, google and find out.> http://secure.theneedleworks.com/store/addProduct2.jsp?ProductId=109378 First, pick your focal point, the thing you want to emphasize. Lots of articles tell you to do this, but they don't say how. The way I pick my focal point is to put my canvas away where I can't see it and then draw what I remember on paper. I am not very good at drawing but you don't have to be at this step. All you need to do is roughly sketch out what you remember. My virtual drawing of this cowgirl outfit from Shelly Tribbey is just a long sleeved shirt, some vertical lines to indicate a vest, and a skirt shape with a cactus on it. I didn't draw the gingham pattern of the shirt, or the belt, or the star. I didn't remember them. So they will be less prominent when I stitch the design. My focal point will be the parts I remember. This personalizes your canvas to some extent. None of us will remember a canvas exactly the same way. Once you have your focal points, you can get down to business. First make copies of your canvas on the copy machine. You'll need one in color and maybe three in black and white. Enlarge some of the copies if you think you will need better pictures than the original size. You will mark up the black and white ones with notes and will refer to the color one to see what goes where after something is stitched over and you can't see the original to stitch on top of that already covered area. One of the black and white copies should be the same size as the canvas. You'll find out why you need this later. Finish before beginning. By that I mean think about how you plan to finish an item when you are choosing thread and stitches. If this was going to be a rug, I would choose wool and tent stitches. If this was going to be a Christmas ornament that needed to compete with other ornaments for attention on a lighted Christmas tree, I'd probably choose a lot of metallics as well as traditional red and green colors (or maybe you'd coordinate your colors to the colors of the ornaments you use each year). But this ornament would probably be hung on a bulletin board in my office to stoke my inner cowgirl, so I don't need to be careful to not use stitches that snag or delicate threads that won't hold up under wear. I can use just about anything I want for my cowgirl clothes. Now, take a careful look at the canvas, starting with the focal points. I sketched the long sleeved shirt, the vest and the skirt with the cactus plant design. So those are the things I want to emphasize. The shirt has a red and white checked gingham pattern. Checkerboard patterns immediately bring Scotch stitch and Mosaic stitch to mind. Look carefully at the canvas' red and white squares. Looks like they are three threads wide and three threads high which most closely resembles Mosaic stitch. We have our first stitch! Now for the thread. Light and shiny areas are more prominent on a canvas than dark and/or matte items. Remember this when picking threads. We want to match the colors of the painted canvas in this example, but you still will use this rule. My other focal points are the vest and the skirt and the cactus so I am going to have to pick threads for the shirt that won't fight for attention with the vest. How about cotton? Everyone is likely to have a little red and white cotton thread in their stash. Since I am going to use Mosaic stitch and that's a diagonal stitch, I probably don't want to use cotton perle. It may not cover the canvas well. How about cotton floss? We can experiment with the number of plies we use in the margin around the design and see whether 4 plies will work or if we need 6. I can also get fancy with my stitches by making the Mosaic stitch / all slant one way with the red stitches and all slant the other way \ with the white. That'll be a subtle way of putting motion and light play on the canvas without drawing too much attention away from the vest. Write down Mosaic and red and white cotton floss on one of your black and white copies of the canvas and draw an arrow to the shirt. This copy is your shopping list. You can easily take it to your LNS if you need something (and the color copy folded in your purse or pocket will help match colors) or to your stash when you pull threads. As for the yellow cuffs, the blue trim on the collar and the cuffs, the blue edge of the shirt where it overlaps, and the buttons, they can be in cotton floss, too. They will probably be all tent stitched except maybe for the buttons. We'll reserve judgement on the buttons (are beads too big, how about French knots or maybe just a cross stitch in a perle thread to make it stand out?), but add yellow and navy to the shopping list of cotton floss colors. Moving on to the vest, it is black with a medium green collar and gold trim. My little brother had a cowboy vest when he was little and I remember it was some sort of suede. Rainbow Gallery's Very Velvet has lots of greens and black available and it will look like fake suede when stitched. Petite Very Velvet's a good choice for an 18 count canvas, too. http://www.rainbowgallery.com/detail.cfm?ID=686 But what about a stitch? I like to use stitches that echo the shape of the area I'm stitching. Thinking back to my focal point sketch, the vest was basically an H shape. Partly that's because my drawing skills greatly resemble my 5 year old niece's, but also that is pretty much the shape of the vest with a fancy collar and trim on top. What stitch is going to be basically horizontal and easy to compensate? We've got that fancy collar with the curves, remember. That screams Compensation. How about brick stitch? Brick stitch over two threads will easily cover the black and green vest areas and where the two colors meet we can couch down a long length of yellow or gold Petite Very Velvet with a matching ply of cotton floss to hide the seam and also do the trim on the vest collar. Write down the stitches and Petite Very Velvet color numbers that may work on your road map. Make a note you'll need a cotton floss in the same yellow as the Petite Very Velvet for the cording on the vest so you can couch it. You can always change your choices when you actually see the thread or even substitute something else if the colors on your monitor aren't at all what the thread looks like in person. We are in the planning stage and a choice we make now may change when we make another choice later. I think that's enough for this message. Stay tuned for Part 3 *PART THREE* Ok, we have a plan for the shirt and vest of the cowgirl outfit painted canvas. We need to think about the skirt and the cactus plant next, then we will have covered the focal points of this canvas. http://secure.theneedleworks.com/store/addProduct2.jsp?ProductId=109378 Even though we aren't dealing with the star on the skirt right now, when planning stitches for the skirt area, you need to take it into account. There's going to be compensation around the star and the cactus, so we are going to need a stitch that can be compensated without pulling out all our hair. In Ruth Dilts' book, she says she always uses tent stitch somewhere on a canvas. I've heard other people say they like to include tent stitches as a rest for the eyes. I'm sure you have seen embellished canvases that are a mish-mash of stitches. The stitcher overwhelmed the canvas using everything but the kitchen sink. Looking at the skirt and thinking about resting our eyes somewhere, how about using tent stitches on the skirt? I hear groans from the back row from all those who hate boring plain old tent stitch but wait! There are ways to make tent stitch exciting while using it as a rest stop on an embellished canvas. Look at the skirt carefully. There is a blue line dividing it into three parts: an inverted triangle on top and a right and left side to the skirt. How about using tent stitch on the right side of the skirt, the side with the cactus, so the tent stitches go //// and then using reversed tent on the left side where the star is so the stitches go \\\\\? You can stitch the right side the normal way, then turn the canvas on its side so that the star is at the top and tent stitch the left side of the skirt, the one with the star. When you turn the canvas right side up again, the star side will magically all be slanting \\\\\\. The two tent stitched areas will meet at the blue line. What about the top triangle of the skirt? Well, we could use tent stitches there, too, but it probably would be better to use another stitch so that the / or \ of the tent stitches below is balanced with a horizontal stitch. How about the brick stitch we used on the vest? We can vary it to make it over one thread instead of over two threads which is what we plan to use for the vest. Easy to compensate, too, always a good thing. Now we are left with the blue line. I think a cross stitch will work here. It won't slant to the right or to the left but it will work nicely with the small space. Now we need to think about threads. The skirt is medium brown. We already have cotton floss for the shirt and Petite Very Velvet for the vest. It always helps me pick threads if I think about what a real version of something looks like. Narrows down the choices. Thinking about a real cowgirl outfit, I suspect the skirt might be a rather matte material. Certainly not shiny and probably duller than the gingham checked shirt. Less leather-looking than the vest as well. How about a wool thread? On 18 count canvas one ply of Paternayan or a strand of Appleton crewel would work but I could go a bit fancy and try a strand of a silk/wool if my cowgirl is married to a sugar daddy. Or Medici would look very nice. Actually, any brown wool thread that matches the color on your color copy will be just fine. Wool threads are the workhorses of needlepoint. They are versatile, come in a huge range of colors, and don't stand out in a crowd. Just the thing for a cowgirl's skirt. A bonus benefit is that they do tent and brick stitches nicely. Not every thread does a great job on every stitch. Lastly, we have the blue seam dividing the skirt sections. We already have chosen to use blue cotton floss in the shirt trim above. It'll work nicely, here, too, especially if we use 6-8 plies in the cross stitch to make it stand up a bit and contrast with the wool. Or if you like, you could find a wool that matches the color of the blue cotton floss. Either way, write down the choices on the road map and we're ready to tackle the cactus and then the last remaining bits of the canvas, the star and belt. This message is getting long so let's break again. Jane/Chilly Hollow *PART FOUR* I'm explaining in great detail how I figure out a plan to embellish a painted canvas, using this cowgirl outfit as an example: http://secure.theneedleworks.com/store/addProduct2.jsp?ProductId=109378 It's time to talk about the cactus. It is a similar green to the cowgirl's vest with blue stripes that seem to be the same color as the blue trim on the shirt and the blue in the star. Designers unify their canvases by repeating colors just like we are unifying our stitch choices by doing variations on tent and brick stitches. If you think about getting dressed for an important occasion, you probably are going to have matching shoes and a purse, or maybe your tie and your pocket square will be in the same pattern and/or color. It's the same principle. Instinctively we know that similar things make us look pulled together. Painted canvases are no different. But does using a similar color mean I have to use a similar thread? The cactus is one of my focal points. That means I want it to stand out. Will it stand out if I use green Petite Very Velvet and blue cotton floss? Are those colors and threads good choices for the stitches I want to use? To solve this problem, let's tackle choosing stitches for the cactus first. Looking at the way the canvas is painted, the cactus has a fat green vertical stripe next to a thin blue stripe. We could just do long stitches from the top to the bottom of the cactus, starting from the left with two long Petite Very Velvets, then one strand (not separated into plies) of the blue cotton floss, then two Petites and a blue floss, etc. That would work, but would it stand out? I'd guess the Petite Very Velvet would be higher than the cotton floss since it is fatter in diameter. We can fix this by switching to the same blue in Petite Very Velvet, if there is such a thing. http://www.rainbowgallery.com/detail.cfm?ID=686 Fortunately, there is a navy blue Petite Very Velvet. If it doesn't match the blue cotton floss, at least there are a lot of color choices among the various brands of cotton floss and we can pick our Petite Very Velvet first, then match the floss to it. Make a note on the shopping list copy of the canvas of the threads you want and that the cotton floss needs to match the Petite Very Velvet when it comes to the blue. Ok, now we are thinking about doing long stripes of the cactus in two colors. But is this going to be a focal point? Will it stand out from the brown wool skirt? How about padding the cactus? This will make for a 3-d cactus that is a bit more eye-catching. Remember that black and white copy of the canvas we made? The one that is the same size as the actual canvas, not the enlarged one? Grab that and a pair of paper scissors. (Not your good embroidery scissors! Paper dulls them.) Now cut out the cactus shape from the xerox copy. Next, trim the paper cactus to make it smaller than the painted canvas one. Just trim away the outside margin a little, laying it down on the real thing to check as you work. It doesn't have to be perfect, just a slightly smaller version maybe shrunken on all sizes by a stitch. Once you are satisfied, grab a cotton makeup remover pad from the bathroom. I use the plain ones, not the quilted, but it really doesn't matter. Put your paper pattern on it, trace around it with a pencil and cut out a mini cactus from the cotton. Lay the padding on the cactus and stitch it in place with one stitch in the middle using a ply of cotton floss. Now when you stitch your long stitches on top of the padding, they will be slightly raised. You will use the color copy you made to tell you which color to use where. I'd recommend starting in the middle and stitching to one side of the cactus and then going back to the middle and stitching out to the other side. This will help keep the padding from shifting under you. If you are scissors challenged or find this just too finicky, don't worry. You can take a ply of your wool for the skirt and do short horizontal (I repeat, HORIZONTAL) stitches inside the cactus shape. The rule for padding with threads is that you lay the threads in the opposite direction than the way the final top row will go. Just like the cut-out version, you stitch your padding stitches well inside the painted cactus margins. Then do the long vertical stitches on top like we planned with the Petite Very Velvet. Either way you go, you will have padding under the long stitches. But what about the edges where the cactus stitches meet the tent stitching of the skirt? You may have a sort of ragged edge. The way to handle this is to stitch the cactus first, then that section of the skirt, so you know where you need to put a tent stitch here and then to make the cactus look smooth. Pull out another of your canvas xeroxes and note that you need to stitch the canvas before the cactus. This canvas will be your road map of stitching. The same thing will be true of the star; you'll also stitch it before you do the reverse tent in its background. Sometimes it is nice to label each section 1, 2, 3, etc. on your road map copy with the stitches you plan to use on one copy and use another copy as your shopping list with all the thread types, colors, brands, etc. on it. I often scratch right through my shopping list as I put stuff in my shopping basket or I might check off the threads I found in my stash. All this marking up makes it hard to read the stitches I plan for each area. If you are neat, you may combine both types of things on your road map. Or you may want to have separate road maps for each sort of thing. I prefer two because it is less confusing to me. When it comes to stitch order, I generally stitch the things in the background first, then the things that are on top. But when you need to know where the two things meet, like the skirt and its cactus and star, do the top items first. On the road map of stitches and order of stitching, I'd do the shirt, then the vest; the cactus and star, then the skirt. Somethings are obvious--you will have to do the gingham squares, then the blue trim and the yellow cuffs, etc, then whatever stitch you choose for the buttons on top. For the vest, you'll have to stitch the vest proper, then the collar, then couch down the cording trim on top. Common sense is your guide here. Back to the cactus. Once you have the cactus padded and then stitched, you might want to fancy it up. I know the canvas isn't painted this way but my cactus plant at home has spikes sticking out here and there. You could take one ply of your blue cotton floss and, coming up from the back side out away from the plant and going down into the body of the cactus with a sharp needle instead of the usual blunt tapestry needle, do some straight lines to make those hairy spikes. Use a pencil on one of your copies, making lines and erasing them until you have 10-12 sticking out from the cactus that look good to you. Then do the same thing on the real canvas. Of course you are going to have to have both the cactus and its background stitched first. This is the last thing you do in this area. A more fancy cactus might be stitched using a hairy thread like Charleston if you can find a green and a blue you like in that thread. Or instead of doing long stitches over padding, do a long stitch in your blue thread doubled in the needle and then do large cross stitches two threads high and wide with your green Petite Very Velvet. This way you don't have to bother with padding yet the cactus will still stand out as a focal point against the plain tent stitched background. Is your head spinning yet? Let's take a break before tackling the star and then the belt. Jane/Chily Hollow *PART FIVE* I am explaining in great detail how I figure out a plan of attack for embellishing a painted canvas, using this cowgirl outfit as my example, to try and help those who are paralyzed with fear when they consider stitching a painted canvas. http://secure.theneedleworks.com/store/addProduct2.jsp?ProductId=109378 We have finished all the areas I identified as focal points and their backgrounds; now it is time to do the last little bits. The star on the skirt looks like the same blue as the shirt trim and the cactus' blue stripe. It also looks like the yellow shirt cuff, the yellow cording trim on the vest, and the belt buckle. Now we have to decide if we want to stay with the blue and yellow cotton floss we picked for earlier items. In my own mind, I would expect a sheriff's star and a belt buckle to be gold, not yellow. However, the star and the buckle aren't focal points for me, so forget about using gold Fyreworks or other extremely bright and shiny golds. You are going to have to find a rather dull gold, maybe Kreinik's Vatican gold or Golden Sand. I like #8 or #4 braid on 18 count canvas but let's wait and pick stitches before we decide whether to go with the larger or smaller diameter thread. http://www.kreinik.com/articles/color_cht You could also use a navy Kreinik for the inside of the star, but I think I want to use the same blue cotton floss I've been using all over this canvas so as not to emphasize this too much. I want to use all 6 plies and stitch a long stitch that comes up at one point and goes down in the middle of the star. First I'll come up at each point and go down in the middle, then I'll work my way around the star, filing in each section. It'll end up almost like an eyelet stitch, with each stitch sharing that central hole. Using a laying tool of some kind to keep the plies all straight is going to be very important here. Notice that I am ignoring the gold paint around the outside border of the star. Once I stitch the blue and then do the background of the skirt, I will go back and stitch long, straight stitches with my Kreinik gold color, probably in the smaller #4 size. Once again, I'll come up at the point and go down in the valley area where each /\ meets. Using a sharp needle may help here since you'll be stitching into those reverse tent stitches. This should give some interest to the star but not make it so flashy that it is all you see on this canvas. As for the belt, I like to do belts in simple horizontal stitches. From the picture, it looks like the belt is 6 threads high and the buckle is the same width. How about just vertical stitches in brown for the leather belt? Once again, we can use Petite Very Velvet in brown to do a leathery look. I would stitch the brown leather belt first, then do the gold buckle in the very same simple stitch. This will give us a belt and buckle that looks fairly realistic but that doesn't detract from the vest or the shirt or the skirt that surround it. I guess I would stitch it after the shirt but before the vest. Since we are using the same stitches for both areas of the belt, it probably is going to be best to use the Kreinik #8 braid since that is closer to the diameter of the Petite Very Velvet brown leather area. I think the #4 we used on the star will be too thin. Using the same shade of gold on both the star and the buckle will unify our design but a different size of the thread is going to work better in this area. Make notes on your shopping list. We still need to make up our minds about what to do about the buttons on the shirt. That has to wait until the end once everything else is stitched and you can see whether beads look ok with all the stitching or whether they are just too big or the wrong color. In my experience, beads don't come in nearly as many colors as threads does, and besides, I am not sure our cowgirl would have fancy buttons on her shirt anyway. You might want to write down "beads for buttons?" on your shopping list and take a look at what is available. A stitch guide you work out ahead of time is always subject to change depending on what threads and colors are available to you. Since I am going to finish this as an ornament, I took a final look at the piece and imagined again I was Dale Evans wearing this to help me see if there was anything else I needed to add. There's no rule against stitching something extra that wasn't painted on the canvas, you know! And if I were Dale, I'd be wearing fringe. No self respecting cowgirl is without fringe! There are two logical places to put fringe, at the bottom of the skirt and at the bottom of the vest. I'm going to have a lot of leftover Petite Very Velvet in several colors that will make great fringe. I am not sure that this thread will look ok next to the wool at the edge of the skirt so I think I'll put my fringe along the bottom of the vest. To do that, I am going to not stitch the very last row of the bottom of the vest. I will stitch all the way down to the next-to-the-last row then leave the last row blank. Once the rest of the canvas is all stitched, I will come back and thread up my needle with a length of Petite Very Velvet a little longer than twice the length I want my fringe to be. Go down in a hole at one end of the vest and then come up in the next hole. Pull the thread half way through so that you have two long ends about the same length. Remove the needle and tie a square knot on top of the canvas. You have your first two pieces of fringe! Once you get all the holes filled, you can go back and give the fringe a haircut to make all the ends even. Since the vest is at an angle, you probably will cut the fringe at a slant. Just comb all the ends flat with your needle, and trim cautiously, a little at a time. Here's a place you can play with color. You can do the fringe in all blue (you have blue from the cactus), in brown to match the belt, in green to look like the collar of the vest, in yellow like your cording, or in black to match the body of the vest. I personally would probably use black only but if your cowgirl feels fancy, alternate two colors every 3-4 fringes, or use them all. Whatever suits your taste. But remember to write down you are going to not stitch the last row of the vest's bottom on your road map or it is absolutely certain you are going to be zipping along stitching and you'll forget to stop. There may not be many rules about how to embellish a canvas, but one rule is certain--write down stopping points or you will get to rip out later! However, ripping out is your friend. You never will be 100% certain how something will look until you actually stitch it. So use the fat margins of your canvas to do a test drive of your stitch to see how it looks before you commit yourself on the canvas. If you are unsure about a section, don't rip it out right away. Put it where you can see it during your daily actitivies and think about it a little. You can also hold the canvas up to a mirror and look at the image. Often the reflected image helps you make up your mind about a problematic area. Looking at it from the same distance as it will be seen once done also helps. Remember that you see your stitching up close, often from less than 24 inches, and once it is done, very few eyeballs will be that close to it. Let's stop here. I'll summarize things in my last message. Jane/Chilly Hollow |
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