Some Thoughts on the Path

While I’m thinking about the large octagonal borders (they’re proving very tricky to plan!), I’m also thinking about the “path” section. I really like both of these stitches, but they are both much too close in scale to the stitches in the border, and I think they’d be much too busy as well. The path is much the largest area, and I need to keep it from fighting with the borders. There needs to be some calm somewhere!

This is more promising, but the lower experiment with lots of different colour combinations and thicknesses is also too busy. I think if I can stretch out the variations to create larger sections and make the colour changes less strident, this might work. The stitch grows quite quickly, as well. I just hope my stash is equal to the task…

I wasn’t intending to start on the path yet, but given the already-referred-to difficulties I’m having with the octagonal borders , I wanted to be making progress somewhere!

The Octagonal Borders Are Giving Me Trouble

If the long borders were looking monolithic, the large octagonal ones looked like a huge outcrop in the middle of nowhere!

So, as before, I’m playing with tacking stitch divisions to see whether I can plan some shapes that will give me a start.

These borders are too narrow, I think. They are the size that works in the long borders, but the different outline shape makes a difference, I think.

And I don’t think this works, either. The broader border somehow seems to make the shape unbalanced, which is very peculiar when it seems closer to dividing the shape into thirds on the diagonal.

At this point, I started to think in different directions. Maybe, instead of geometric divisions, I should think of a large “hero” stitch or stitched motif, which has rivers of stitching around it, or even one single other pattern running around it. Hmmm….

So this next picture, believe it or not, is playing with that idea.

The red stranded cotton is placing the main skeleton stitches for a stitch motif called Milanese Pinwheel (another one which looks a lot like a patchwork motif to me!). The visual effect is a bit square in comparison with the real thing, not as helpful as I hoped – I may just have to Be Brave and be ready for a lot of unpicking!

More on the Long Borders

When I found a stitch called “F-106 stitch” and notionally inspired by delta wing aircraft, I thought it would be a good one to include. The section looked a bit monolithic, so I faded the colours of the “background” stitches outwards from the centre. Although I have to say – I’m no flier, but that formation looks dangerously close to me!

I’m trying to balance the patterns and keep them from proliferating too much so when I’d done these sections (on both long borders), I thought it would be a good idea to continue the Victorian Step Stitch pattern through the second outer sections, only altering the colours slightly. I’ve even tried to keep in step with the first sections across the divider.

The triangles by the border required another pause, but in the end I kept with the aero theme, and picked a stitch called “Wild Goose Chase”, which I rather suspect may be inspired by a patchwork pattern. Trying to maintain a certain amount of echo and balance, I’ve used similar colours to the first blocks of Victorian Step Stitch, and also reflected the pattern on either side of the centre line.

Long Borders

There’s a good deal of trial and error with this one!

Once I’d divided up the long borders (both of them, so that it remains easy to keep track of) I started to experiment with stitches to fill in the various sections.

For a while I thought I might like to play with voiding some of the patterns, so I started with a sort of skip tent stitch. I wasn’t happy with that – it ended up combining stripes with a general appearance of not being there at all.

So, next trial – what about some large bosses, Diagonal Rhodes Stitch or something like that, which will be nicely reminiscent of the topiary experimentation that inspired the cushion?

I suppose this might have worked, maybe with a river of stitching in another colour to join the three diamonds, but when I looked at it in the context of the entire border, I wasn’t happy with it. Quite why, I’m not sure, but it felt like a false start. I’ve had quite a few of those with this project, and I’m beginning to recognise the sensation!

So, in the end, I settled for finding a smallish full coverage stitch, using vertical stitches like the borders, which isn’t on quite the same diagonal as the border edgings, but seems nevertheless to work. It’s called Victorian Step Stitch in Jo Ippolito Christensen’s book, and I’ve never seen it anywhere else (that goes for a lot of the stitches in that book!). A small advantage was that it mirrored relatively easily about the centre line, creating an arrowhead.

Planning the long borders

The long borders just looked too big, too monolithic, if you like, when I came to look at them with the corners in place. I don’t want the pattern looking too “bitty” and fragmented, but a certain amount of breaking up of the shape seemed to be a good idea.

I started by running tacking stitches in stranded cotton so that I could look at the divisions they created and make decisions based on those, rather than using the wool. Tapestry canvas is a destroyer of thread, and it’s rare that you can reuse much of it if you have to take it out. I’ve plenty of stranded cotton, and I can reuse it a few times for experiments – just not for the final piece!

That seemed enough of a division, so I pulled out the stranded cotton and reinstated the new lines using short straight stitches in two shades of the Paterna.

I’m trying to use all the yarn in blends. It makes for a livelier effect, and given I’m not enamoured of Yarn Chicken, it will also eke out some of the yarns!

Once I’d looked at the first couple of intersections between lines, I decided to add a bit of subtle emphasis. At this point, I had no idea what stitches I would be using in the “beds” (to retain the link to gardening), but I somehow felt that I needed to blunt the apex of the diamond and triangle shapes.

I couldn’t tell you why – any ideas?

More progress on the corner borders

I wondered, once I’d done the large squared daisies and recovered from the experience of the one which kept going wrong, whether I should use Diagonal Rhodes Stitch again, or do something else, so here I was experimenting with a sort of fill pattern using upright cross stitch.

And no, both the thread (too pale) and the stitch pattern (somehow too incoherent, which is an odd thing for such a regimented stitch to look). Rhodes Stitch it is, then.

Ah, but what size of Rhodes Stitch?

The larger one, I decided in the end. This isn’t to be a cushion for leaning on, and although the “boss” created by the larger Rhodes Stitch had very long floats, it created a really lovely contrast with all those stitches going down in the middle of the Squared Daisies.

As you see here.

Now it’s done, I really like the look of this pairing. I think Jo Ippolito Christenson backstitches between her stitches, which I’m not going to do. I think this is a good enough recollection of the inspiration as it is, while staying true to itself as a piece of canvaswork.

Getting back to the Parterre

We last saw the Parterre in December, when I’d found a very pretty stitch (Squared Daisies) which was very trying to work, because it involved a lot of stitches going into the same hole.

As I was up to my eyes in exasperation with Amarna and William Marshall at the time, I set the parterre to one side so as to have fewer moments of fury and despair. Now that Amarna is in a totally different stage of effort and William is on the home straight, I’m returning to it, with a quieter mind and greater regularity of effort.

With the very cheering result that you see here. In no time, so it seemed, I’d finished the two panels in small squared daisies, and moved on to infilling them with Diamond Rhodes Stitch. You’ll see that the Daisies are worked in two different shades of red, not quite regularly alternating. The thread is a single strand of Paterna.

For the Diamond Rhodes Stitch, I decided to use a single colour. It’s two strands of Appleton Crewel wool, which is about the weight of the single strand Paterna, and it’s allowed me to soften the colour slightly by using two different shades in the needle.

And then I moved on to the Super Large Squared Daisies, and, as it turned out, some repeated doing and undoing on one particular one, because I had misplaced the central hole.

Howl and Growl!

And do you know what is really infuriating?

It only went wrong in this particular case. All the others were fine.