Some needlepoint since Christmas

Now that my Christmas knitting is done, shipped, and received, I can attend to some other projects. My little bird is still in good shape - have elongated one branch and am about to start with another pink flower. Progress! But really, stitching on linen is such a summertime project, one to stitch when the spring starts to come and the days grow longer and a nice early evening can be spent on the front porch with fabric, scissors, and cotton thread. And a nice glass of wine. Here's my little bird's progress:

He may receive some work in a couple of weekends
when I go to visit a stitching friend.

In the meantime, I noticed a green project bag that I knew contained some pieces of my late mother's needlepoint. I took a look and found two iris pieces that I knew she bought at my shop because I remember buying them from the sales rep. She had always liked pansies and violets, but these were truly beautiful pieces that I know she couldn't resist when I got to convincing her that she had to have them. The first one she had started . . . and then the yarn got separated from its project (thus motivating my plaintive plea in my last post to please, stitchers and knitters, please label your projects or provide a list of your colors, or at the very least, make sure everything is together in one bag. It makes going through your beloved projects so much more in keeping with your own wishes for your beloved projects)! Apparently, Mom had started stitching this piece, notice the Q-Snap frame holding it in place, and so it was up to me to find matching colors. Did I mention that I still have some Persian Yarn in my storage unit?!

While keeping an eye on what I "bought" from myself both for my poor accountant's sake and to keep my website current, I checked, brought home, stitched with, and went back (I think I started doing this activity in the summer, if the truth be told) to find a better match for the greens and the pinks. I did put it down when I couldn't find the exact shades of green for the leaves, but picked it up again earlier this month because, well, really, who's going to know? Except everyone who reads this blog, and really, it doesn't matter all that much. The ol' galloping horse and all! When I picked it up again I started stitching like a crazy woman, just wanting to finish this petal and that color, and all the while doing some background so that there is less background drudgery when our iris is complete:

Mom stitched the far left-hand petal, that delicate pink part, and
the bottom part of the left-hand leaf. She had also
started the basketweave in the bottom left, and it took some
guesswork to find the correct color of yarn she used.

BTW, "Lee" is the name of the needlepoint designer/manufacturer. Lee's Needle Arts is a needlepoint company that had some beautiful needlepoint colors on their canvases that I always found luscious, and the canvases were also reasonably priced for hand-painted canvases. When I bought my shop, I wanted to bring in an alternative to the types of needlepoint my predecessor had always carried. So this was one of my new offerings to a whole new slew of customers, including my mother.

And on this picture is where my background color ran out. Really, I'm quite proud of the progress on my background - there were a lot of places to fill in and join in a continuous, smooth angle. The background is stitched in a basketweave pattern, so called because the back of it looks like a woven basket. Literally. While it takes more yarn to complete and will help keep a monoweave canvas straight (with mono canvas, the individual strands are woven over and under one another, rather than through one another like an interlock or Penelope canvas), it also takes some "reading" of the canvas to know whether you should stitch up the angle or down it. If you get your stitching direction wrong, then it will show uneven-ness on the front, and the back will have two straight up-and-up rows instead of an up row and a sideways, woven row. But I geek out.

While NNW does not have the background color in stock, and the single importer and dye-er of said color has been in product backorder for almost two years on all of their Persian yarn, I think maybe, just maybe, I have found two little skeins that I can use to complete this project, finally. Then those completion endorphins can kick in and I can begin another project!

But wait, I already have started another project!

This one was not on a frame; in fact, Mom had not even started stitching it. I started stitching it without a frame and realized my wisdom over the shop-owning years in "suggesting" that a customer buy a frame when starting a needlepoint project. Not being on a frame already allowed me to buy one from myself (always an interesting financial transaction) and mount it. I gotta say, this style of frame is amazingly versatile for different sizes of needlepoint projects (I used part of it for my Swan piece) but it is holy h#(&ck to mount a piece of needlepoint onto it. It often took me, one of my minions, and the customer to firmly attach the needlepoint to one of these frames, and all the while avoiding the tiny little nails that hold your needlepoint on top and bottom. But again, I digress. Here is the already-started piece, and some progress has been made since last week:

Aren't these colors just extraordinary? The deep, rich blue
set off by an equally strong purple, and while the greens
have a little more yellow than I usually like, their shades kind of
fade into a supporting role against these strong purples tones.

Like I said, Mom had simply put the colors and the canvas (folded! oh noooo!) into a gallon-sized Ziploc bag and not even begun it. Which, if I die tomorrow, will be the case for me with some projects, I admit, but I hope to have many, many more good years of stitching. With this particular piece, I'm using longer "pulls" of yarn from the Persian than I normally do, in part because I am discovering as I stitch just how long a piece goes before I have to start another piece. The yarn is a good quality yarn, and it does not fray towards the end of the stitching. On the other hand, I can't use as much of the skeins of DMC yarn on my pull, as it is a single strand and is more loosely twisted than the individual strands of Persian. And again, I am stitching background (using tent stitch this time, as there are really no large stretches of background that would warrant using the basketweave) as I go, so that I don't stitch all the pretty parts and leave the dull, boring background to do. Someday. That's one of the advantages of working on a frame, too - you do a section, then you roll it to the next section, and just move on up the piece until you are done, pattern and background and all.

So that's it for this post. I will definitely show some progress on the second of the two iris pieces, and perhaps my background color will arrive in the next week or so. Which will leave the question, which do I stitch first??