Mostly Bargello

I am making progress with the Wave Bargello sample. I am on the 3rd row of the TrianglePoint border and I think it is working up well.

This border is turning out to be very interesting. I had never heard of TrianglePoint when one of my blog readers from Australia, emailed me and suggested I look into TrianglePoint.

Who knows what I was writing about that day, I was probably complaining about the lack of good graphic needlepoint designs or whining about borders. It was a while ago.

I bought the book, used of course, on amazon.com. When it arrived I was surprised. The idea was interesting, close to unique maybe. A variation on Bargello? A needlepoint stitch? I am still not sure but this is the first time I have used it, besides just *stitch doodling*. There are some things to learn about it, it is not all straight forward. Not at all.

I can’t say I am in love with the designs done in total TrianglePoint stitching, they are very graphic, graphics with no softening at all. They can easily be optical and you can do a magnificent fade with TrianglePoint but I would not use it for shading except in the most modern art designs. Very Picasso Cubist used that way.

So far, the best usage I have found is this, borders. This stitch is perfect for defining an area, bordering or enclosing it in a variety of ways. I think I need to delve deeper into the book, more then the graphs and beautiful pictures.

It was created by someone name Shirlee Lantz. The book’s sub-title is “From Persian Pavilions to Op Art with One Stitch”. I always like a good sub-title.

It was published in 1978, in a nice Hard Bound book on heavy paper stock. It has 32 pages of excellent color pictures, printed on matte finish paper. A handsome book.

The back dust jacket (yes, my nice used copy has a intact & clean dust jacket) says that Shirlee lantz also authored *The Pagent of Pattern for Needlepoint Canvas*.

I see Ms Lantz likes alliteration like I do. It has good reviews from the NY Times, The New Yorker and Mademoiselle magazine (does that even exist anymore?).

I love this, a review from Publishers Weekely says ” This stunning book may well be the new bible of needlepoint….soundly but vivaciously written and throughly fascinating”

Wow, that is praise indeed but I hardly think an obscure book on TrianglePoint is the new needlepoint bible.

I want to show you a close up of my border, in progress.

There are some interesting points here. One of the really important things you need to get right for TrianglePoint is laying the threads. I am pretty much used to that from doing needlepoint and very much so for Bargello but it essential for this. As you can see, I am not always perfect there but I think I do alright.

I need to learn to use a laying tool. I have always just laid threads with my fingers and the needle I am stitching with but I have ordered these wonderful Rosewood Laying tools to sell on NewNeedlepoint.com. plus I now sell Trolley Needles and a nice Gold Plated Laying Needle. I guess I should learn how to use one. (digression alert).

I stitched the white row border first, next to the Bargello pattern. I like to use white for the first row for these borders, I think it sets off the colors used in the Bargello well and creates no conflicts as it *crosses colors* in the pattern.

I did the white first, then starting there and intending to keep the colors in the same order as they are in the pattern, I did the green next.

Then I spaced out and did 2 & 1/2 sides with the pink. It should have been the red. OK, I figured, it will be OK but it wasn’t.

It was not so much that the colors were out of sequence, it was more that the green triangles needed a strong color on top of them to balance them.

I should have taken a picture of the doomed pink triangles, out of their right order but I am not that swift. They were, however, wrong. very wrong so I pulled them all out and re-did them with the red, correct color, correct order.

Then next is the pink, then the blue and then I need to pick a color to repeat, to *cap* the border.

Since there are five colors in my Bargello pattern there should be 5 rows of border but for this border, I need an even number of rows.

This is different. It is almost always best to use an odd number of colors in any Bargello pattern. It keeps the pattern from becoming static, it somehow almost *rotates* the colors.

This is crucial in Florentine Embroidery Bargello. You loose the whole point of the every other row patterning with an even number of colors.

I am not going to use the Purple Pointed Curves Bargello in my new NewNeedlepoint Bargello categories. It just doesn’t work. The colors, while they really are lovely just do not *show* well and the fill in stitching just does not do it.

I think my Twin Peaks Bargello with the Slanted Gobelin Stitch multiple border is a success, so when Waves is done, I will have 2 of the 3 I want to have ready to re-open the Bargello Category.

I just realized I never took a picture of this Bargello all finished. This is the closest I got. I need to do that.

Listing the new canvases & kits on nn.com is coming along. Today I did a Kelly Clark design called “Nativity Cow”. It does have a “Nativity”
look and feel to it and uses lots of shiny Metallic threads in the design. This is available as both kit or canvas alone.

Also a interesting new canvas from Patt of Patt & Lee Designs. I call it 30 Houses Contemporary Sampler. It does look like a sampler but not like a traditional sampler. I like the strong graphics and interesting color use. There are 23 colors in this design. It too is being listed as the canvas alone or as a kit

I had just listed the first of Patt & my Beginner’s Series needlepoint canvases & kits this past weekend. It is a adorable variation on Patt’s Shower Cat design, simplified for beginners and with a short text added.

It sold on Monday, I am somewhat amazed and quite pleased. I think Patt & I will be doing more of these.

I was waiting to see if one actually sold before I wrote my NewNeedlepoint.com Beginners Basic Directions Text so…I did it this morning.

It took me 3 + hours but I think it is good, or if not good it is very not bad and helpful.

I did the basics, how to start, how to end and begin new threads, tension etc. I added some diagrams of the most basic stitches and gave the excellent Stitch-0pedia web site addresses for the more basic and useful of the decorative stitches. I added the ANG web site.

Then I wrote something I wish someone had written for me when I first began to needlepoint.

There is a lot of basic information out there that everybody assumes everybody else knows (like what Stitch Painting means).

I learned to stitch from books on needlepoint. Again, there is basic information that is never covered. As far as I know, there is no “Needlepoint for Dummies” book yet.

I wrote about the things that slipped me up as a newbie, the things I did not know and did not know to ask. I wrote about canvas mesh sizes and what they mean to threads and stitching (no joke, that one took me a bit of time to reserach) and appropriate needle sizes for different
mesh sizes (now, that one took me forever to find out).

I wrote about making sure the stitches all *point* in the same direction. That is the single hardest thing to teach an absolute newbie about. That even when stitching an outline, the stitch direction does not follow the outline, it is a static direction.

And here’s the biggie. My first needlepoint humiliation.

I had done a little needlepoint 20 years before but none since

There was this great and funky looking needlepoint store 2 doors down from the post office I went to frequently. It was next to the health foods store and near the last of the old time 5 & 10 Cent Stores in West Concord, Massachusetts, near where I lived.

Concord can be a very snobby town, the cream of the Mayflower Daughters of the Old Yankee Aristoracy lived there and probably still do.

But West Concord was different, it was funky, arty, much more fun, loose and very much down scale. The store was in an old antique of a building, not renovated since the Civil War years.

It felt comfortable, and I jumped in.

One day I went into the store. The owner was there and we got to talking. I bought a needlepoint canvas, Silk & Ivory 50% silk and 50% wool threads, a basic needlepoint book, a package of needles and a needlepoint tote bag ( I still have that, it is a great bag).

I was pumped, I went home and stitched it. It took me maybe 3 weeks, maybe a month, the canvas was, I think, 6 X 8 inches.

It was a lovely rose on a stylized leopard print background (remember those? I bet you long time stitchers can even “date” me from that canvas).

I took it back to the store to be finished, I was shining with happiness and pride.

I walked into the store, it was a Saturday morning and I gave the woman working there my canvas proudly. I asked to have it finished as a pillow.

Now, I know it must have been crude, my stitching can’t have been much but I must have been absolutely glowing with pride in it.

This woman, who I had never seen before briefly looks at my canvas, she looks down at me (she was taller than me but even if she had been a foot shorter then me, she would have looked down at me) and told me I had to stitch 2 or 3 extra rows for the finisher.

She did not explain what she meant, she just handed it back and turned her back on me.

I was flattened. I felt extremely bug like and silenty scuttled out the door.

Some times I am amazed I ever went back there but I did. I wanted to stitch and there was no place else (that I knew of) to get this stuff.

I never did see that woman again, in all the times I went to that store, since that time but it stayed with me.

How was a newbie needlepointer to know this? This and Other things? How?

So, I wrote it all down, all of it I could think of. I talked stitch direction, tension, I know rolling the canvas to stitch but I gave them someplace to learn about stitching with a frame.

I talked dye lots and I talked about not taking on too much as a beginner stitcher. I wrote about all the people with good needlepoint intentions who started with too much, too big, too difficult a project and became overwhelmed, giving up on needlepoint.

Anyway, I am sure there are lots of things I forgot to mention. I probably will be adding to and editing this Beginners Basics mini-manual constantly but it is a start.

Anyone who has any ideas or suggestions for me to add to this *magnum opus* please sent them along. I am always glad to attribute.

To button this up for tonight, I am still deeply in Mansfield Park, I am at Fanny Price’s “coming out” ball tonight and the sooner I stop blathering here the sooner I can go read it.

Using Gold Braid

I have a confession to make, I cheated on my Jane Austen reading in order “program” I had re-read Pride & Prejudice just a few months ago (or maybe it was last year but it was still so fresh). I was finding it tedious to be reading it again so soon (What? blasphemy!).

I read a quarter of it and then put it away and moved on to the next one in order, Mansfield Park. I am enjoying it. The character of Mrs. Norris is so much more detailed in her awfulness and while Lady Bertram is indeed lazy and indolent, there is no hint of her Laudanum use. There is quite a bit of that in the movie.

I had heard once that the movie took “liberties” with the story. This might turn out to be true. The character and feelings of Fanny Price are very different in the book from in the movie. There is little resemblance between these 2 girls, even though they are supposedly the same person.

I tired to watch Wendy & Lucy, one of last years big deal arty independent films. I often love these but Wendy & Lucy lost me soon after the opening credits, her walking the dog and humming, then spying on the camp of migrant guys.

Goodbye to that movie. I watched this years hit movie The Proposal. The words formula, predictible, Sandra Bullock is no longer so cute and lame story all apply. Sure, Alaska was gorgeous but how many months a year is the weather that nice and not cold & snowy. I also wondered if the Alaska setting was a nod to Sarah Palin (who was a big deal while this was being made, if I have my timing right).

One of my worst nightmares is the USA run by President Palin, so this “connection” did not give me the “warm & fuzzies”.

I bet you are wondering when I will get around to Needlepoint, the supposed subject of this blog?

I am almost done loading the first of the Hand Painted Needlepoint Canvases & Kits done by others (that is exactly what the file holding them all reads, “others”)

These represent about 3/4 of the new canvases I received in the first part of the shipment, the ones they had in stock.

I did not want to bury NewNeedlepoint.com in new stuff so I am introducing them this way. The other 1/4 I will load slowly as I wait for the rest of the order. (4-6 weeks for a hand painted design).

These are a few new Graphic Designs:
Trinity by Eileen Best. This is listed as both a kit and the canvas.

The Shaded Street by Gail Lang reminds me of Savannah or Beacon Hill, Boston iin the summer. This too is available as both kit and canvas.

Many of the designs I am listing now call for Gold Metallic Threads (or other metallic colors). I am enjoying using my new stock of Kreinik Metallic Braid threads. I have used quite a bit of the gold and the white metallic and the copper so far. No call yet for the silver or the other colors…yet.

I have listed 2 new Christmas Tree Ornament Needlepoints. I don’t know if this is too late for this year’s holiday. I hope not. The next one makes good use of the Gold Braid, this is sold as a kit only
The American Star

OK, this is great. My blog utility has gone *down* again (AGAIN !!!) and I can’t post any more pictures.

How am I supposed to discuss these canvases without pictures?

I have a Less Than Full Skien Ornament from Patt & Lee Designs. It uses an amazing 13 colors. This is canvas only.

At least I still have links.

And the first of Patt & my beginner designs and adaptations of her designs for beginners.
I love this startled cat, indeed “It’s Always Something”.

I added Gone Fishing. This is the most expensive canvas I bought (so far, anyway) but I think it is wonderful. My fisherman husband loves this, he has already suggested I stitch this for him. He says he would like this on the family room couch better then all my other *girlie* needlepoint pillows.

There is the Laurel Burch Purple Cat. it is very intense, rich with colors and lots of gold.

Another beginner kit, The Bee & Flower

I wish you could see this picture. This is a gorgeous Asian Influenced Chrysanthemum design. For the kit, I have done the pattern behind the flowers in Gold Metallic Braid and supplied enough Paternayan yarn to do this as a circle or a square.

I I have more to list tomorrow.

Bargello update. I have 1 & 3/4 (or 2 and 3/4’s, depending on which ones I end up using) Bargellos done. When I have 3 to list, I will re-open the Bargello Category. My stitching is going well. When I don’t do it for a while, I forget how much I like combining the colors for and stitching Bargello patterns.