Parterre – no, these are the final stages!

So you may recall that, when last seen, I was working the Surrey Stitch boss for the centre of the Parterre. This is something else that uses a lot of thread, so I had a nervous time wondering whether I would run out of the wool I wanted to use before I finished it. And because the stitches were pushed down for quite a while as I was working it, I tied some thread around the finished stitches for a few days to help them stand up to be trimmed.

Then I realised that some of those stitches were still loops and might not be standing up to where they should.

So the semi-final trim took a bit longer than I perhaps hoped, and is maybe not quite as short and trim as it should be. That’s because I don’t have enough wool to do it again, and I am absolutely terrified of trimming it too short!

However, any further trim can wait – it’s something that can be done off the frame, and I wanted to see how the whole Parterre had turned out.

Pretty well, I think. It is squarer than it looks, I just need to block it a bit to take the frame-kinks out of the canvas!

Parterre – final stages

While I was stitching away at the limestone pavement, it occurred to me that I maybe needed to think of some way to “finish off” the edges. I’d left a corner space in the green border, being unwilling to go down to a straight stitch over a single thread, which rarely looks good.

I decided that the best way to to deal with the whole look would be to pull the inside and outside together, using the cream to run around the whole garden – limestone chippings to separate one garden room from another!

Using a double cross stitch boss in each corner seemed to work – just enough emphasis to put a full stop at the end of each run of the plait stitch.

The plait stitch also helped by tidying up the gap in the short sides. I left the gap because the “hedge” repeat didn’t fit into the short side neatly, and when I got to the edge with the limestone pavement, I wasn’t happy with the way it looked. I am now, though – I think the plait stitch worked well, stopping the pavement falling off into the view!

Once I’d got everything else done, I could start to work on the central boss. My book told me that Turkey Stitch, which I was intending to use, is Unsuitable For Mono Thread Canvas, which was a bit of a facer, but fortunately offered Surrey Stitch as an alternative.

So I got started on the Surrey Stitch – which turned out not to be as quick as I expected..

So, not quite the final stages!

Parterre Progress

Interior design involves balancing places for the eye to rest with things for it to look at, but having that happen at different scales and different distances from the eye means that you can have just as much visual excitement as you want.

Once I put my “hero” stitches – the pinwheels – in the octagonal borders, I needed to find something to surround them. It needed to be much quieter, to allow the heroes to be truly heroic, but at the same time, I wanted something that would be visually interesting if you bothered to look.

This is the first two stages of Palace Stitch, which was one of the stitches I interviewed for the limestone pavement. Heathering the yarns means that even close up you have something to look at, and it helps me eke out my stash of Paternayan, too. It’s too beautiful not to use, but doing a large project is becoming something of an exercise in invention!

The final stage of Palace Stitch involves small squares of diagonal stitches. Again I have heathered yarns, this time using lighter, yellowy greens.

The placement of all my colouring variations isn’t quite exact, but I like it that way. Plants don’t grow identically, and a lot of the charm of knot gardens and parterres lies in the crisp shapes with the subtly varying colours of the plants filling them. I’ve been trying to paint hillsides and forests of late, and I never thought I’d say this, but the canvaswork is easier!

I think this is a success. The slightly lighter centre, the darker edges, and the varying colours of the pinwheels (four different shades of Appletons Crewel Wool held together) all create a varying effect which is properly geometrical and definitely canvaswork while still managing to be vaguely horticultural.

I do like it when a Plan comes together!

Octagonal Borders Taking Some Time To Resolve!

I felt that the Octagonal borders needed to be less subdivided than the long borders, which in turn meant finding a large stitch pattern. After some to-ing and fro-ing, I decided that I like this one – Milanese Pinwheel (again from Jo Ippolito Christensen).

I’m not so keen on the fact that it doesn’t really tesselate neatly – there’s a peculiar shape left in the middle if you interlock the stitched in the obvious way, and it just didn’t look pleasing. So it was obvious to me that I had best space them out to create islands in an inner sea, as it were. Not like this, however – this was to be a set of five closely interlocked, leaving any partial pinwheels unstitched, to be replaced with some other stitch. But I think it’s already looking congested.

So, trying again.

This time, four, spaced out to form a square. I’m really not convinced by this, either. The slanting sides of the octagons push the pinwheels too close together, so again we have a slightly congested look. Furthermore, as I observed with the borders for William Marshall, the square form can look very static, and in this case, that’s not playing nicely with the swirling movement in the pinwheels.

I think this does, however.

Upending the square onto the diagonal makes it possible to push the pinwheels further away from one another, and while it may only be a couple of threads, I think it looks less congested. That leaves room for me to put another, smaller, pattern “behind” the pinwheels, as it were.

You may notice that while I was wrestling in thought with those pinwheels, I kept on at the path.. So, now I have to do the pinwheels in the other octagon, and decide what to run into the background…

Borders in the Knot Garden

There’s still a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing on the Knot Garden/ Parterre. There’s a lot of border elements to do, and I’m quite certain that I’m going to have to find a way of making sense of a middle section on the short sides: the “Princess Stitch” border I’ve chosen for the outside border is symmetrical around a stitch, and the circular border in the centre is centred around a thread, so something may well look a bit too “off” to be fudged, if I’m not careful!

This pattern is called “Squared Daisies” in my copy of Jo Ippolito Christensen’s book on needlepoint. It looked like a very big pattern in the book, full of interest and personality, but while it has personality , it looks a bit small here, and I’m having Doubts about it.

So, in the spirit of exploration and investigation that I usually apply to needlecrafts, I found another corner and tried again, twice the size.

Yikes, that’s big. And Yikes, again, for the number of threads going through the central hole.

But I think I might rather like it.

In fact, I’ve carried on, and decided I do rather like it. I’m varying the colours to maintain the variation shown in the original inspiration, and now I’m thinking that – again in the spirit of variation – I will also finish the smaller stitch size version.

The other two corners can be the same stitches but in the other order, so that the similar corners are set diagonally to one another. And the only trouble with that is that these stitches are remarkably trying to do, and after a day wrestling with goldwork or Amarna, all I want to do is curl up with a good book!

Knot Garden progressing

One of the original stars of the inspiration picture was a circular bed with something exuberant in it, at the centre of the garden. As you can see, I put some effort into planning where it would go, and how I would get something close enough to circular, using the gauge of canvas I’m using.

The intention is to create a sculpted Turkey Work boss, but now I have the outline in place, I think that should wait until the last moment, when everything else is done, and I’m not scrolling backwards and forwards across the frame all the time.

So I went back to the borders representing the outlines of the beds, trying to keep the design crisp and balanced, so that whatever I put in the borders can be suitably displayed. And therein lies a problem. When I sat back and looked at what I’d done, I thought it didn’t look nearly strong enough for what I was going to create.

Why, I wonder?

Well, I think it relates to a certain sameness. All the borders are the same stitch, and it makes it look less like something inspired by a garden, and more like something inspired by a drawing of a garden.

So I’ve changed the outer border to something chunkier and with a slightly different shape, and so far I think it may be working!

Beginning The Knot Garden

A “Site Visit” recently gave me the chance to look at my wools in the room for which the cushion is destined, and to talk to my cousin about the whole thing. It also provided a reminder of the truism that, no matter how extensive the stash, for any particular project, the stash will prove inadequate!

I had my experimental panel with me, and one of the things my cousin said was that she was not particularly taken with the effect of the tent stitches or straight stitches infilling between the pattern stitches. I agreed that it looked a bit clunky and congested, so when I got home again, I got out my acrylic paints and painted the canvas, just the area of the borders.

What I have done is to use three different shades of brown, solo and in mixtures. And I’ve painted both sides of the canvas, to make the coverage a bit more thorough. This way, I’m not trying to produce an absolutely flat colour, as though the canvas were dyed or coloured from the start.

You can also see in this picture that the “pathways” spill out into the surrounding canvas. I was intending the stitching to do so as well, but there’s an old saying in military circles, that “No plan survives contact with the enemy”. I would adapt that for stitchers – I don’t regard the canvas as my enemy, but no plan survives the first stitching session unchanged!

I started to work the Parisian Stitch border around the beds, using two different colours of crewel wool in the needle, and soon decided that although I want to have a couple of rows of tent stitch around the outside, to help with adding the back to the cushion, I also want the pattern area properly delimited. So the line between the beds will be filled with a line of Parisian stitch as well.