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| JudyAnn's "Magnolia" |
I browse the Internet each morning, looking for content about stitch guides or general needlepoint to add to either the Chilly Hollow Needlepoint Adventure or this blog which is about stitch guides. There are lots of tutorials and tips, but it struck me that there's not much to help you tackle a category of designs and give you tools to stitch that category successfully. So I thought I'd attempt it using the category of flower designs and two examples.
The first (above) is JudyAnn's "Magnolia," a printed design that you can pick up on Etsy or on JudyAnn's website. Links are below.
"Magnolia" is available on 18 count canvas as either a 4 inch round or a 6 inch square. I'll talk about the cheaper and smaller 4 inch round.
The second design I'll be discussing is "Red Floral Heart" from Ann Wheat Pace Designs. This is a hand painted canvas on 18 count canvas that is roughly 5 inches wide and 5 inches tall. Link is below.
Both designs have flowers with petals, leaves and stems. The flowers have yellow centers in both instances. What stitches work well on such elements? Let's start with stems which are fairly stylized in both cases. They aren't fat or thin stems, just regular stems that aren't that important when it comes to the design. You could go old school and tent stitch them. That might be a good choice for Magnolia which has very little stem. However, the red heart has six stems so it might make sense to use stem stitch (ha, get it?) there. Stem stitch, especially done in rows packed tightly (it's called Packed Stem Stitch if you do rows) with a brown perle-type thread gives you a slightly knobby texture that mimics woody plant stems. If I am doing several rows of Packed Stem Stitch, I like to offset the rows so that each row's stitch starts and stops in a slightly different place than the previous row's. That adds to the texture.
Does learning stem stitch seem overwhelming? Then let's couch a thread over those stems! Couching is easy. You come up at the top (or bottom) of your stem, hold the thread roughly in the direction the stem goes, and using a thinner thread in a matching color, couch the main thread with little stitches that go over the main thread. Space the couching stitches fairly evenly. It's a little fiddly handling two threads at once but you can use magnets to position the main thread while you couch. When you get to the end, plunge both the main thread and the couching thread to the back side and tie off. (I don't like to drag threads from one stem to another across all that background personally but you do what makes sense to you.)
The trick with couching is to pick the right main thread. Good choices are single strand threads like wool, perle cotton, bamboo or even a metallic if you can find the right color and want to add subtle sparkle to your design. I normally use one ply of a matching color of cotton floss to tie down my main thread because cotton floss is a) cheap and b) comes in a ton of colors so matching colors is fairly easy.
If your stem is fat and has a lot of bend, you can try using Diagonal Mosaic stitch. You may need to do lots of compensation if this is your choice, though. A simpler but similar look can be achieved with long slanting stitches. These are called satin stitch. Just adjust the width and slant of your stitch to cover the painted stem, but check after you finish a stem to see if you need to add another stitch or two to get complete coverage over your stem.
So there you have five stitches that will work on any stem in a floral design: tent stitch, Packed Stem Stitch, couching, Diagonal Mosaic, and Satin Stitch.
Next time we'll talk about the center of the flowers.
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