oh dear

Well that didn't work then.

Ironically I think the original stitch combination was the best after all. I am still convinced that it should work somehow but I will come back to it sometime when I am a bit more experienced because there is a more immediate problem to focus on now. The difference between dark and light shades in the background isn't great enough to create the impression of fabric folds that I want on the bellydance hip scarf. I will have to break up the pattern to some extent but that is difficult to do naturally in small areas so I am going to have a practice run at that first.

Multiple threaded needles

I am still not sure about my current experiment but it is at least giving me an opportunity to practice the technique of keeping a few needles threaded and switching between them to sew small sections at a time.

It makes mistakes easier to identify before they become a major problem but the difficulty is to make sure that the threads don't get tangled up in each other. You end up having to 'park' needles in strange places to make sure that the thread doesn't pass behind an area that you are going to want to use.

Pattern experiment

I have started an experiment to test my idea about having a second pattern on the bellydancer's hip scarf. I will be sewing an octopus in one stitch pattern on a background of a different pattern, both of which shade from dark to light at the same time following the red line.

That all looks a bit complicated but there is some very quick shading that needs to happen on the hip scarf so I want to try it at the hardest level first. In order to help the eye distinguish between the two stitch patterns I have selected ones that are different shades and shapes. The body of the octopus is darker and based on octagons while the background is the large mid-tone lace pattern I have used before. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work that well.

Neither the shading nor the two different patterns are showing up clearly so far. I am going to try dividing the image into four quarters and using different combinations of stitch patterns to see what combinations are more effective but this is not looking very hopeful.

Back done for now

I have got about as far with the bellydancer's back as I can without moving the frame:

I did decide to smooth out the highlights a bit and I think it looks better now. The next section to move on to is the bra top but as I want to use the same pattern for that as the hip scarf I need to think about them together. In order to add interest to the hipscarf, which would otherwise be quite a large area with not much going on, I would like to use a second stitch pattern to create a shape within the background pattern than shades at the same time so that it looks like a pattern on the fabric. I am not certain that this will work and even if it does which stitch patterns I chose will make a big difference so I am going to do some experiments first to find the best combination.