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…