No unpicking required

Finally I have managed to sew a leaf for the Autumn panel that did not require any of the stitches to be unpicked:

I suspect what helped is that although there are a variety of colours they are all roughly the same shade so there were fewer awkward transitions. Again there are seven colours of thread included in this motif, not including the black outline. The three leaves together look quite good:

There is a nice contrast in shape and colour that works well. The plan has always been to do five coloured leaves in total and gold ones in the background. However, when I started thinking about where the gold leaves should fit I started wondering. I tried making some outlines:

I am not really convinced. So I am carrying on with the next coloured leaf and thinking about the gold ones in the background. The may need to be much smaller than I had thought.

A lesson in chosing stitch patterns

Well after a bit of uncertainty about what extra colour I should use I have finished the second leaf on the Autumn panel:

I chose a slightly purple toned red rather than a bright colour because although it was counter intuitive to pick something that on its own looked unnatural the combination actually looked more natural that way. I really need to develop my understanding of colour! Anyway, I don't think the final result required any more unpicking after the last picture I put up, but overall this one was difficult. I think the problem lay in the stitch pattern I was using. As you can see it is a very heavy pattern with stitches going in a lot of directions. On the one hand multiple directions is good for shading as the complexity helps prevent the kind of stripes that appear when simple patterns are broken up regularly. On the other hand, the complexity and density means that there has to be a lot of overlap between colours to create gradual shading or the colours are too dense (in the areas of transition each repetition of the pattern had to contain at least three different colours of thread). This makes it very difficult to judge how the shading will work out as you go along. Which in turn leads to a lot of unpicking. So the lesson learnt is that this stitch pattern is not good for shading - but it has forced me to practise my stitch counting in broken patterns which is probably good for me.

Colour Shading Again

I have managed to get myself to the part of the country that has the rest of my embroidery silks in it and have been carrying on with the autumn leaves panel. This has involved some unpicking since I decided that I wanted to original leaf I started with to be predominantly yellow and far more gradually shaded than my initial attempts had been. I have therefore been using multiple needles with different coloured threads to help avoid mistakes when I am shading between colours:

Actually, I appear to be getting better at counting on evenweave fabric and while using blackwork stitch patters as I am making far fewer mistakes of that type. Which is a very good thing as I have found that the best way to create the kind of gradual shift in colour I want is to have continual shading with no sections that are completely one colour. The picture bellow shows the completed leaf in better light:

Although there is a general trend towards yellow, some parts shade into green and some are orange. But rather than differentiating between the areas I wanted to be different colours when I was sewing I took a very fluid approach. That explanation wasn't very clear so maybe a close up will help:

There are seven different coloured threads in the above image, not including the black outline, but they all overlap so much that you have to concentrate hard to see where one starts and the next begins. This allows for very quick but smooth graduations in colour. The trick seems to be to not have even a single repetition of the pattern in a single colour. Where there are no sections that are identifiably one colour it becomes easier for the eye to accept the transition to the next one as there is simply no dividing line, however blurred.

As you can see in the first picture above, I started on a second leaf while I had the limited selection of threads that is going to be much darker than the first. However, the problem I had with the colour on that was the opposite one to with the first. The red/orange patch that has been sewn above contained three different coloured threads but unless you look closely it is virtually impossible to tell them apart. In the image bellow I have done some unpicking and introduced some lighter colours to help:

This is better but the use of only five colours of thread still seems quite limited. I think I will need to add something even darker to give this one the variation in colour it needs. The main thing I have learnt from this exercise so far is that colour is really very complicated!

Autumn Panel

Firstly, here is the sampler I made for my mum with its backing done so it is ready to be displayed:

Now on to the next project. I bought a few pots of fabric paint (brown, gold and bronze) and attacked a piece of evenweave fabric so it is an uneven colour. I started by soaking the fabric in diluted brown paint so that there would be no completely white sections left then used the brown paint to darken some areas. Finally I added the gold and bronze for texture and sparkle. Since the design plan is to go back to the autumn leaf I did on my previous set of colour experiments, the background is supposed to be vaguely treelike in its shape. I will do five different shaped leaves using coloured shading with a few gold and bronze ones using very thin sparkly thread in the background. It will be a bit abstract and muted. Here are the materials:

I am at the opposite end of the country from my collection of embroidery silks at present to I just chose a few colours that seemed to work well together. However I quickly hit on a snag:

The yellow thread I selected in the shop turned out to look pale brown when used against a brown fabric rather than a white one. It also blends in with the background so that it is virtually invisible. The similarity in colour between the 'yello' thread and the background also means that the orange stands out hugely and doesn't blend together as well as it looked like it would. From a distance the situation is even more obvious:

Only the orange shows up at all. I need to re-think this. I really like working on a coloured background but in future I need to have it with me when I select the colours I will use since it has a knock on effect on all the rest of the colours used. I have found an interesting looking book on using colour in embroidery which I hope to get for my birthday so I plan to work on thus more in the future. In the mean time I need to rethink my colour choices on this piece.

Back

I have submitted the PhD and am now back in the land of the living, hurrah! So now I can get back to my sewing. I am going to ease myself back into it and play with using a coloured background before I go for the next task but I have lots of ideas from my time away.