Happy New Year!

Wishing you all a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year in 2013!  The first morning of the New Year dawned cold but sunny here on the Cape, with a bright blue sky overhead.  What a coincidence, since there's a bright blue sky over my angel as well!

Since my last post, I've been up to my ears cooking for a houseful of menfolk--a situation I actually welcomed, since my two sons visiting for the holidays do love Ma's home-cooking!  But I did manage to sneak in some stitching, working on the beginning of a background for the angel.

The fact that the lion isn't centered on the angel did bother me, and I thought long and hard about how to remedy the problem.  I've decided to create a "scene" behind the angel to pull the design together, and my first step was to create a sky.  And, as I'm so fond of doing, I chose to stitch the sky by needle-blending!

Since the canvas is so tall, I turned it upside down to make stitching easier and began at the horizon, working up to the top of the canvas.  I used five consecutive values of blue DMC cotton floss--#775, 3841, 3325, 3755 and 334--to gradually intensify the sky as it naturally appears.  Using four plies of floss, I began at the horizon with DMC floss #775, stitching seven canvas threads deep across the canvas and staggering the bottom stitches of basketweave so a line wouldn't be created.  After stitching straight across the canvas, I subtracted one ply of DMC floss #775 and added one ply of DMC floss #3841 to the mix, repeating the process.

 When I finished stitching the section with four plies of DMC floss #3841, I started adding one ply of the next value--DMC floss #3325.  By the time I reached the top of the canvas, I was using two plies of DMC floss #3755 and two plies of DMC floss #334.  Voila!--a realistic-looking sky!