Summertime, and the stitchin' is easy

A few weeks ago, a needlepoint shop contacted me with a request: could I design a Cape Cod doorway for a customer who was fond of my Doorways to the Past series? I already had one Cape doorway--Nantucket--but the customer was looking for one with more of a cottage feel, complete with hydrangeas and a picket fence. I finally came up with this design, called "Cape Cod Summer," which incorporates all the elements that make my part of the world so charming at this time of year!

I shared this photo with a friend, who responded that she wouldn't know where to begin to stitch the canvas. A strange comment, I thought, from someone who is a phenomenal stitcher! It's a fairly straight-forward design and stitch-painted, which takes the guess-work out of where one color ends and the next begins.

Some designers rarely stitch their own canvases, but I always stitch my models as a "test-drive" before painting a master: if there's any "tweaking" to be done, I want the kinks ironed out before the canvas reaches the customer's hands. As I blog-stitch this canvas, I'll be breaking down the individual elements into manageable "bites" of stitching--the easiest way I know to avoid "choking" on a painted canvas, be it an architectural design or an entirely different design theme.

Looking for an armchair vacation to Cape Cod? Join me as I develop a virtual stitch guide for this canvas!

Rx for "pain" in painted canvas

I'll never forget the day when my oldest son came home from school with his first long-term class assignment. His eyes were glazed, his face was ashen, and his palms were sweaty: in six weeks, his full-blown report on the Boston Tea Party was due!

I calmly suggested he approach this report as if he were eating a hamburger: if he took small bites and chewed slowly, he wouldn't choke. One bite each for research, notecards, bibliography, and outline, with the final mouthful writing the report itself.

What do writing reports and eating hamburgers have to do with needlepoint? A lot! I've seen the same glazed look on the faces of many newcomers to needlepoint, who've fallen in love with a painted canvas, plunked down their hard-earned money to purchase it, and then wondered what the heck they should do next. My advice? Keep it simple--both in threads and stitches selected--and break the stitching down into piece-parts to keep from choking!

The canvas I selected from my stash to illustrate my point is a Lee egg, a pretty design that has two important things going for it: it's small, so it won't take a millenium to finish it, and it's stitch-painted, so you won't spend more time wondering where one color begins and the next ends than you do in actual stitching. In the first photo, I've chosen DMC cotton floss to basketweave the background.

Flash forward to the second photo, where I pulled two shades of Petite Very Velvet from my stash to work the stems and leaves. The PVV provides a higher profile against the background and also offers contrasting texture. For the "faces" of the pansies, I again used DMC floss, in tent stitches and a Smyrna cross variation in the center.

The last photo shows the completed egg, with the petals of the pansies worked in DMC floss in a satin stitch, turning the canvas a quarter-turn as needed to stitch the petals in the direction in which they're growing.

A complicated canvas? No. Fancy threads? Not really. And except for keeping the satin stitches as smooth as possible, the stitching involved plain old tent stitches and basketweave. The value of a pleasing finished canvas, accomplished in a relatively short time without undue strain on the budget, and with a sense of accomplishment that makes you want to stitch another one? Priceless!