Evolutions in Stitches!

This evening bag is an old one - at least 7 or 8 years old. I was in my "jeweled bug" phase, and was determined to put this one onto black.

Drawing it was easy, as I used a white paint pen, but I knew I didn't want to stitch a solid background on that black canvas. Hard on the eyes at any age, especially mine!

My wonderful finisher and good friend Vikki Pinson here in Austin made this evening bag - I simply gave her the little 5" x 7" canvas, and told her to do whatever she wished with it - and this was the result. I love those sassy looking beads at the bottom.

Anyway, the background I settled on doing was the result of just playing around, some time before, on scrap canvas to see what I could come up with. Quite an evolution!

Next is a composite scan of the evolution of the stitch I used on the background. The pink heart was the first, as I was making backgrounds to use when working on learning to make silk ribbon embroidery flowers. Plain color was boring, so I marked off a grid on this one that left 4 stitches square in between. Leaving the intersections of the horizontal and verticals bare, I then put a darker pink (doesn't show up well on this scan, but I couldn't find the actual stitched piece) single tent stitch in the blank - but made one on top of that going to opposite direction (an X) to make a little bump.

That, of course, gave me the idea of using a bead there instead - thus the orange and yellow grid. On this one, you can see the progression of stitching, etc.

It uses three stitches square inside the lines, and Scotch stitch used to fill them in. Then one day I was looking at the canvas with the dots placed on it, and "saw" something else. The arrow points to the lines I drew to illustrate the placement of the long stitches made with Ribbon Floss - and the dot left in the middle for later inserting a bead there as well as in the intersections of the Ribbon Floss.

The background could, of course, be worked first in basketweave (leaving the dot bare) and then putting the Ribbon Floss into place. Very simple!!

I used black YLI Ribbon Floss Shimmer Blend on the black evening bag, with Sundance black hexagonal beads. It really sparkles and glitters!! Since I don't sparkle and glitter any more, I let Vikki keep it to illustrate her expertise in creating fabulous things with a simple needlepoint canvas.

The little green piece with beads is another story - it was on the scan, but it doesn't belong with this particular explanation/evolution, as it's worked with the dots in a different format. It led to several other patterns in a different phase. Later.