More Bullions & Home Stitching

During the Great Freeze of Aught 24 (Music Man reference – do you get it?), and since I was sick anyway, I worked on a few things from home.

I discovered there’s a big disadvantage to working on arts, hobbies, and crafts at home when you normally work away from home in a separate studio. When you have a dedicated space, you’re used to having all your tools and paraphernalia – and all your extra tools and paraphernalia, including the ones you didn’t know you needed – on hand.

For example, I don’t have a decent camera at home, or a laying tool, or a good ruler, a functional drawing pencil, or even, to my great chagrin, the thing I wanted most – a stand to hold my embroidery hoop.

Despite the drawbacks, I did have fabric, embroidery floss, needles, a hoop, scissors, and a good light, so I was able to continue some test stitching on my little bullion piece that I mentioned here last week.

My phone doesn’t take the greatest close-up photos in the world, and I find it’s not the best tool for photographing this type of work, anyway. While it’s great for people, activities, and so forth, it really lacks when it comes to what I’d call “small still life.”

But that’s ok, because this is one of several “test stitching” projects. Once I’m pretty close to achieving the idea in my head and I’ve got all the kinks worked out – whether I finish an entire test-stitching project or just enough to test the part of the idea I want to test – then I’ll stitch the final project step-by-step.

At that point, I’ll photograph with a good camera, and maybe even work up some video if that’s part of the plan.

In the meantime, on this test, I was working out some color ideas. I was specifically working on graduated color changes on each subsequent flower up the little swirled branch.

I discovered that my plan didn’t work. Can you see why in the photo above?

This required me to re-stitch the flowers, because I needed to change my sequence of shade combinations.

You would think this was a bad thing. I have to cut out all those bullion knots, and start over!

In fact, it was a good thing, because it answered the last question that I had about the whole project.

Now, I’m ready to stitch the final piece! And with the end of the Great Freeze and the dissipation of the Wog, I am doing that here in the studio today. That means I have a camera, all my tools, all my threads, all the little essentials to make the job much more pleasant and much more efficient.

Ahhhhhh… life is good!

I’ll update you on the finish of this project and the launch of the kit and stitch-along that goes with it, pretty soon!

Happy Wednesday!