Lilies

The cross stitch lilies are finished and here is a picture of them with the pansy design I had already done from the same set of patterns. I have one frame in the style I want to use for them so I will have a go at framing one to see if it works before I get a matching one for the other.

They are so colourful and the shading between colours is really well designed. Plus, at only 6 inches square they are a very manageable size. I'm glad I found the patterns.

Blue shading

Instead of going straight on to the second rainbow I got distracted, as usual, by the question of shading. Specifically, how well changing from a dark to a light colour works by comparison to changing thread thickness. To do that I found three colours that were designed to work as dark, medium and light tones of the same colour.

I started by simply shading between the different colours all at the same thickness, 1strand, which worked but lacked the dramatic impact of shading in black. When trying changing thickness I couldn't use sewing machine thread as the thinnest like I did when experimenting with black because I don't have an appropriate colour so I had to go with 1, 2 and 3 strands of embroidery silk. I  then did two tries at shading using both thickness and colour. I broke up the pattern identically for all three tries  but for the two with different thicknesses the first was simple and the second was further broken down so that some of the darker shade were reduced to thinner strands and some of the lighter shade were done thicker. To make that clearer the first picture bellow shows all the darkest 3 strand stitches and the second shows with the 2 strand stitches included.

The difference at this stage appears minimal. Even when the whole thing was completed there was not a major difference between the two tries.

The second is smoother both visually and too the touch, especially between 2 and 1 strands where the difference in thickness and colour intensity is more readily noticed by the naked eye, but the first does not stand out as noticeably bad. It is clear though that using thickness, by whichever method, is much better than simply relying on colour.

Coloured shading

I have had a go at shading a rainbow using the same colours as on the building blocks.

Unlike in the blocks, here yellow is a problem. Red/orange and green/blue/purple work fine but the transitions in and out of yellow are very clear, especially the one between it and green. I'm not sure if the problem is the move from a warm to a cold colour or if that particular shade of green is too dark. I am going to have another go using different thread colours to see how that compares.

Building Blocks 3 - finished

Here are the filled in blocks. I decided to switch the positions of the orange and purple ones from the mock-up which I think looks better and am rather pleased with it. The shading works reasonable well, especially from a distance:

Yellow wasn't too bad in the end though it is still noticeably lighter than the others. I tried to get around the difficulty by using slightly heavier patterns in that block than the others. On the close up bellow you can see that the darkest area is a tapestry stitch to get nearly complete coverage and the other two are ones I used in a previous experiment, from the post titled 'Experiment 2, which came out at the darker end of their respective levels.

The other two blocks that were particularly interesting were purple and orange:

The lightest area of orange shows the importance of direction. The pattern I was copying from had the waves positioned vertically, and initially I did the same but it it looked ridiculous so I tried horizontal and it is now one of my favourite light patterns. I should have taken a picture of the bad version but I had unpicked it before the thought occurred to me.

The dark purple section shows that too complex and small a pattern doesn't read properly. The dark orange shading above is very fiddly but it works because there is enough variation that you can immediately see how the pattern repeats. The purple one looks like a knit or darn, the pattern is virtually impossible to see. I suppose it might be useful at some point if I want to sew a figure waring a jumper but otherwise I think I'll chalk it up to the learning curve and forget about it.

Building Blocks 2 - outline

I decided to have black outlines to all of the blocks in order to help distinguish the different areas and used the recommended technique for transferring patterns from a page to fabric - sewing running stitch through both paper and fabric then tearing the paper away. However, there was a problem. Although I thought I had lined up the vertical lines on the paper pattern with the grain of the fabric I apparently wasn't accurate enough.

You can see how the verticals indicated by the tacking are very slightly diagonal and the boxes ended up rather uneven.

Eventually I just used the tacking as a vague guideline for the height and width of the blocks but worked with the grain of the fabric for verticals. This is what I ended up with:

 Since this is just an exercise it is bearable and I won't start again but it is definitely irregular so I need to find a more accurate way to transfer designs to fabric. I had hoped that by drawing the design as a geometric grid on paper first I would be able to make it uniform but I think for future reference it would be better to work out the angles and sew regular straight line shapes onto the fabric direct. I'll have another go at the tacking technique some time I'm using a more irregular or curved shape as it may just be that I need more practice..

Building Blocks 1

In order to have a go at coloured blackwork I am starting simple by using single threads to create flat blocks of different patterns. This seemed like a good time to try to expand my vocabulary of stitch patterns again and experiment with shading using different patterns. Therefore, I will be sewing a regular pile of coloured cubes, like children's building bocks. This is a simple mock-up of what I am aiming for:

Each cube will be in a single colour and will be shaded entirely by using different patterns. The rules are that I am not allowed to use the same pattern twice or simply add or remove a few stitches from a base pattern  to make it different and I can't cheat by changing thread thickness. This should be interesting, I am slightly worried about the yellow block in case it doesn't show up enough. I looked through my thread collection and these are the colours I have chosen:

The yellow is the darkest one I have and the others are chosen because they are all in the same shade range. I think they make a nice combination.

Sampler

All the experiments I have done looked quite pretty in combination and I live in a house with a ridiculous number of hooks in the walls so I decided to have it as a wall hanging.  Here are the pieces:

I used some felt as a backing and edged it in black ribbon using a piece of twisted wire inside the top seam to ensure it would hang evenly, all things I had in my scrap bag already. This is what it ended up looking like:

Much cheaper than a frame, I think I'll do that again.