TAST Week 17: Wheat Ear Stitch

The Take a Stitch Tuesday stitch this week is Wheat Ear Stitch.  I stitched two Wheat ear stitch samples this week.  The first one is a collection of wheat ears like an emblem on a crest or a flag.

The second is more experimental, it is made up of wheat ear stitches in different threads layered on each other.  I used the threads left over from my Cobblefield Road needlepoint project giving it an undersea coral garden feel.

TAST Week 16: French Knots

French knots are a familiar stitch.  I have used hundreds of them to make a sheep, added them to other TAST pieces as embellishments and played with different numbers of threads and tightness of knots.  I used them to create some cattails and a dragon fly, common sights in the Forest Preserves in the area.

I also used French knots to illustrate some elements of the natural world -- the constellation Orion that I have been observing in the night sky for many years, a caffeine molecule, and one of George Gamow's illustrations of the cosmic big bang.  I have been thinking about cosmology, physics, and bio-chemistry recently as I read Ordinary Geniuses by Gino Segre.

TAST Week 15: Stem Stitch

This week I was inspired by the 18th and early 19th century needlework that I saw in the Fabric of a New Nation exhibit at the Chicago Art Institute and the birds that have been checking out my yard, the bird feeder and the various flowering plants.  I even got a picture of one of my visitors before the dogs chased it away.

The branch is stem stitch and so is the bird, the flowers are made up of detached chain.  All of it is stitched in rayon Edmar threads on green cotton.

TAST Week 14: Satin Stitch

 I chose to demonstrate the use of Satin Stitch by adding a group of bargello variations to my evenweave stitch sampler.  They are taken from Margaret Boyles' book Bargello: An Explosion in Color.  The fiber and color selections are my own.  These complete my stitch sampler.  I am rather pleased with the result.  

I have also been using decorative stitches based on satin stitch on Menagerie, the progressive canvas piece that Cyberpointers is working on this year.  A sample is shown below.  For those who are seeing it for the first time, I am using a bag of red, white and blue threads as the basis for this design on 18 count brown canvas.

Cobblefield Road Completed

I finished stitching Jean Hilton's Cobblefield Road toady.  It was offered as a cyber workshop through the American Needlepoint Guild in 2007.  Ro Pace updated the color selections and the instructions.  I used her color selections and the suggested sparkly canvas.  It is the second Hilton stitch piece that I have completed this year.