Adding Texture

It dawned on me on Friday afternoon that I really *needed* to have a needlepoint hanging on our Au Pair's bedroom door when she arrives next week. (Selena is from South Africa and will be living with us for one year. She will be taking care of little Betsy while Chris and I are at work.) I collect bee things so this Maggie & Co. canvas is right up my alley! The finishing won't be done in time for Selena's arrival but at least the stitching is. I had to work fast so I used an open work stitch (that means leaving some of the unstitched canvas exposed). Stitching with balger in a pale yellow, I used Skip Tent on the wings. Skip Tent means you do every other stitch...talk about easy. The yellow body--Silk & Ivory in Scrambled Egg--is called Woven stitch. The background--Silk & Ivory Pomegranate--is a modified Byzantine. It's a lightning-fast stitch! I used Rainbow Gallery's black Very Velvet for the stripes; the stitch is Hesitation. On the green and black border I used Silk & Ivory Black and Margarita in a Mosaic Stitch. The rows were not a uniform height so I ignored the painted stripes and created my own, making the green ones three boxes high and the black ones two boxes high. You know you can ignore the painted canvas, right??!! It's totally legal. I did the same thing with the antennae: I completely covered them up with the background stitch and then used this really cool memory wire from DMC. We don't currently carry it at TPOIA but I'm thinking we should. It wasn't hard to work with actually. I just laid it over my stitching at the very end and tacked it down with a single strand of floss--this technique is called couching. I really love the antennae and it would have been way too much of a pain to compensate the modified Byzantine around those skinny black lines. It was a win-win! All of the stitches are shown in Stitches to Go, which is a terrific resource book on decorative stitches. It's available in The Point of It All's webstore. Do as I say and not as I did and PLAN AHEAD! I can't believe I waited until the last minute to tackle this project! Happy stitching, Susan PS You can double click on the photos above to see them enlarged.