With Kaffe Fassett's help

Coming up short on yarn quantities is continuing to challenge my ability to squeeze out every last millimeter available. I knew it would be down to the wire with a light blue I've been working and I ended up 1 to 2 strands short (each strand is 36" long, it gets doubled so each working thread is 18" long, the perfect length).

I phoned the company this morning to get the lo down on ordering more yarn. It was a pleasant conversation and the logistics are clear so I'll be keeping track of what I'll need to order. Or will I? . . . 

Another objective for phoning Erhman Tapestry was to see if they produced Kaffe Fassett's "Floral Trellis" needlepoint rug as a kit. I would love to make it, it's quite spectacular, albeit I image a kit for it would cost a pretty penny. Anyhow, I took out his book "Glorious Needlepoint" to make sure I had the correct name of the design. The book is so beautiful and I got lost in it, eventually coming upon this bit in the introduction on designing one's own needlepoints:

It is very important to have quite a few of your colours in crewel weight. This is about one-third the weight of regular tapestry yarn and is used for petit-point and embroidery. Crewel is invaluable when doing subtle shadings, combining two or three colours in each stitch. It is also a life saver when you run out of a colour in full flow, miles from a shop. Just take two similar colours in crewel and you can make an amazing match ...

Well! I remembered the crewel wool I ordered a few months ago in many shades of red, yellow, green, and blue, plus a few browns. So I dug them out and found two shades of blue that when combined 2 stands of one with 1 strand of the other makes a great substitute for the blue that I ran out of! I was so happy about this because I'd been rummaging through all my tapestry yarns from previous projects to see if there was a close matching blue, to no avail.

Brilliant!

The two shades of blue that I used:

And the result, comparing the kit's yarn with my mixed crewel yarn. The right circled light blue is the kit's original yarn, the left circle highlights my 'homemade' mix:

I love Kaffe Fassett! I have several of his books and it's easy to get lost in them for hours.

I will however have to order some yarn because the quantity I am going to need of the dark background is going to be more than what I want to 'make work'. When I pulled the kit out of storage in January, after not working on it for a few years, I discovered some moth damage in the darkest yarn. Not too too bad, but enough that I will have to place an order.

Change in set up

I had to stop using the suspended frame (from the ceiling in front of the sofa, if you recall) for stitching because it was leading me into "bad use" of my body. The cushions are old and the sofa is low and has very little support overall. Even though I put a board under the cushions I found myself scrunched up in a less than comfortable position all too often. Considering that I can spend up to 2 hours at a time in that position it's surprising it lasted as long as it did. For the past few months I've worked in that manner. But I was noticing it in my body so I took out my old stand and now I'm sitting in a proper wooden chair at a correct height. And it feels better.

Regarding needlework, the advice of not throwing anything away is well heeded indeed! I just finished working the petals of these orange flowers and was down to looking through the end pieces of prior work to find enough of the correct color. I used up every last bit of the lighter of the two oranges and I'm left with one strand of the darker orange, which I will need for a bud a little further down the tapestry. I actually had to use a short length of an intermediate orange to finish one bud (circled in red). It is totally unnoticeable.

When I have finished this "row" of stitching (which should be over the weekend) I will have only one row left and the bottom border. Can't believe it!

We had a strong flirtation with spring a week ago but have since had to contend with a bit more wintery weather. We had about 3 inches of snow Monday and there is another storm of mixed precipitation forecast for the weekend. Oh well, it won't be long now. I'm not having to stoke the fire as frequently now that the day temps are in the 30s and sometimes 40s, but most nights still need the heat.

With April around the corner I'm starting to think about which flowers I would like to start from seed. I suspect the price of potted plants will be quite high this spring so sowing seed will be much more economical.

 

Tapestry glitch and the Red Dress

As I am nearing the bottom of the tapestry, some of the thread colors are running out, as to be expected--as long as I don't completely run out. But I did run out of one of the yellows. My stitches are done in one of the recommended techniques (continental) and I think I'm fairly conservative in the use of thread. There was almost enough thread, but just barely not. Oh, well.

Of course, I can contact the company and order some more thread but they are in England and I don't want to wait for just a small area so I decided "to make it work". A picture of the affected Irises is below. Each Iris is supposed to be two-tone only, cream and pale yellow. The pale yellow is what ran out while I was stitching the bottom Iris. So I decided to use some gold wool to add shading to the blossom in two places. It works really well in one place because it's obviously the underside of the petal, and it works OK on the other petal. I hope the gold isn't too dark. When I've finished the whole thing I'll see what's left, thread wise, and decide whether or not the gold distracts. I think it will be OK.

It does mean this one flower is not in the same flat style as the others, but it's not too obvious and it's a big tapestry so I suspect it will go unnoticed. Truth be told, I like the shading.

Top Iris is all cream and yellow, bottom right Iris should be the same but you can see my use of gold to add shading:

 Yes, I think it's an OK solution.

Marion at Marion's World visited The Red Dress, a 14-year international collaborative embroidery project. It's spectacular! It is scheduled to come to North America next year I think, and I'm going to see if it will be anywhere near me. I'd love to see it in person. Extraordinary!

Politics

A political post because the times demand it.

Owl Epilogue

I was so delighted when I went out to fill the bird table this morning. I was greeted by this spirit overseeing the front deck. I'm pretty sure it's the same owl. How beautiful it is!

An Owl Story

 

Barred Owl, picture taken last year

I was sitting at the piano this afternoon when a bird flew by the window. Since I was focused on the music, it was only a fleeting sense of movement out the corner of my eye so I don't know what kind of bird it was but suspected a Blue Jay because they often fly by on their way from the front yard to the back yard. Immediately, the sound of something crashing into one of the bird room windows shattered the peace. I decided I'd better have a look and glancing down from the bird room (it's a good five feet above ground), there lie a beautiful, motionless Barred Owl, head back, wings spread out. Ohh, nooo. It was such a sad sight, a magnificent bird lying there dead by all appearances. It put the kibosh on the musical euphoria of the moment. I thought I saw it take a breath, the breathing of an injured bird, so I went downstairs with the broom to see if I could reach it from the cellar door but the snow was way too deep and I was sinking in up beyond my knees. The broom reached it though and I used it to flip the owl's head as it was sort of flopped back. I realized there was nothing I could do and it would perish. It made me so sad. It was taking a few breaths, and by the time I got back upstairs it occurred to me that maybe it had only been knocked out, and perhaps, just possibly, it would come to. So I kept going to the window to look for positive developments, alas not. But finally, it moved it's head! It had been rendered unconscious! It got up on it's feet and drew it's wings in and sat there for a good ten minutes more then flew to a tree on the front lawn where it remained for the rest of the afternoon. I breathed a glad sigh of relief.

Stitching progress and notes

 

The walkway lights are trying to keep ahead of winter!

Steady progress is being made on the tapestry. I have moved beyond the halfway point!

On a large, repetitive project like this I have found that reading about the craft (needlepoint in this case) is a good motivator. History, techniques, pattern books, they all inspire me, hence boost my interest in keeping the stitches going. I have also found that having set times in the day for working on it is a boost. At the moment my favorite times to stitch are right after breakfast--usually for about an hour--before moving on to piano practice, and again for a few hours in the evening when I can watch ridiculously silly Britcoms on DVD while stitching. It helps that I've seen all the episodes before so I don't need to look at the screen all that much.

Suspending the frame from the ceiling is working out really well. I re-rigged so I can pull it up and away when I want freedom of movement around the sofa. It might seem a bit silly, but it's great! It's rigged so as to be easy to turn over, making the back readily accessible for finishing off a thread. (I prefer to finish off in back rather than park the thread to the side and wait until it's covered by other stitches.)

The tapestry is on large scale mesh: 7 to the inch (the yarn is doubled), and I felt like I wanted something a little finer to work on in spare moments, so I actually started a cross stitch. I found another kit at the thrift shop last week for $7, holiday themed and that's ok because it will likely take me all year to finish it. I like it, and at the moment the biggest trouble is finding the tiny little holes from behind the aida cloth. I keep poking away at it and hope that it will get better with practice. In the meantime, I'm turning the work around to see where the holes are quite often. But it's in hand (not in a hoop) so quite convenient to do so.

So far all I've been stitching are tent stitches because there are a lot of them on the door, so that's very much like needlepoint with the difference being that I do needlepoint in the continental style and the cross stitch as half cross stitch. I'm enjoying it.

A picture of the pattern: