Ready for an Open House!

With the hydrangea bushes planted at the foundation, the "Cape Cod Summer" doorway is finished!

For those of you not familiar with hydrangeas, their blossoms resemble large blue snowballs. The color can range from a light blue to a very intense dark blue when the plants are given a healthy dose of aluminum sulfate!

I wanted to accentuate the flowers in these areas, rather than the leaves, so began with a background stitched in basketweave using Sheep's Silk "Dark Moss," a 50/50 silk/wool overdye. Then I took my ring of blue floss-away bags outside and held various skeins up to one of my hydrangeas to pick just the right value--DMC floss #799!

Using four plies of floss, I stitched the flowers in French knots, using a single wrap but stitching each thread intersection to achieve the round, snowball appearance I was looking for.

In working this canvas, I've broken down different sections--woodwork, clapboards, doorway, etc.--and stitched each as separate segments to illustrate how one goes about attacking a painted canvas. There's no hard-and-fast rule to which section you stitch first, or whether you actually finish one section before moving on to another--it's just my way of doing it. But I think you'll agree that by breaking down the canvas into "bites" or individual elements to be stitched, the process becomes less intimidating and more pleasurable!