Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Turkey Preliminaries

Mary Lake Thompson's Turkey 
To recap, Nancy’s turkey is the 13 count design (12 inches wide by 9 high on an 18x15 inch piece of canvas) shown here.
http://melissashirleydesigns.com/galsearch/index.cgi?index=1189016781_15552&col=

Nancy wrote:
I have looked through my threads and have several that could work in the piece, mostly Splendor and Needlepoint Inc.silk and Impressions silk/wool with some additional random threads pulled because they are in the color range. And Wow! there are a LOT of colors in this piece!

The first thing I wondered when looking at this design is how you want to finish it, Nancy. Are you thinking about making it into a pillow or framing it or something else entirely (like a serving tray for the holidays)? Choosing how you want to finish it (and making a color copy of the canvas for later reference as you stitch) is the first step.

I personally love silks and using Caron’s Impressions. They are good choices for almost any design in my opinion, and since you mention the iridescent sheen on turkey feathers in real life, it’ll be easy to mix a strand of two of thin metallics in your needle (like Kreinik’s blending filament, Accentuate, Bijoux, etc.) with the threads you have in your stash. I personally like Accentuate but Bijoux has the advantage of being slightly striped which looks like feathers to me and blending filament is often easily available to most stitchers. I suggest you visit Needle in a Haystack’s online thread catalogue as they carry both Accentuate and Bijoux and have color photos. That’ll help you narrow down colors if you want to pick up some new threads for this piece. Remember to push Next to see more choices.
http://www.needlestack.com/WebStore/thread.html 

It looks like you have 3 inches of bare canvas all around the outside of your design. This will be useful when it comes to planning outside borders (if any). Why don’t you count the number of threads between the outside of the red border painted on the canvas and the turkey’s feet, wings and tail? Once we know how much space there is, we can think about adding a border outside the red border. (How you plan to finish this will also play into any additional borders. How much bare space do you like to have around a piece for framing or pillow-making? Does your finisher have a preference?)

While you are thinking about borders and finishing and metallics, think about colors. Is there one color in your turkey that you particularly like? We could use that if we add a new outside border. Are you committed to having a white background behind the turkey? You could have anything from white to ecru to tan or even use a shade of green or blue from the colors in the turkey. I expect that you won’t want a white background if this is going to be a pillow.

Please think about all this and respond and then we’ll start talking backgrounds and borders.

Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow Blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com Archived Yahoo 360 postings at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chillyhollow

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