Raven and Sparrow

Nailing down the edges

Lisa's summer tablecloth is moving towards its finish and I have been embroidering as much as I can to get it done. After I did the dragonflies I felt like there was too much of a difference between the heavily worked insects and the slap dashy painted leaves. The foxglove flowers were painted too but seemed too delicate to encase in thread. I did a few experiments and finally settled on stem stitching around the stems and leaves with a thread that matched the background, switching to almost invisible running stitch in the same color around the flowers. The heavier stem stitching helped to integrate the leaves into the rest of the cloth while the flowers were more subtly defined, without creating a clear line around them. The dragonflies and the little white dots are surrounded by three rounds of running stitch, which implies (I hope) the movement of air around them. All that is done now, so I am going around the main body of the cloth stitching in the ditch to nail down the edges before I put a lavender binding around the whole thing and call it done. I'm not sure how I'm going to photograph it in its entirety since my studio has been given over to other uses and my hanging wall is to longer available.

It is sort of exciting to see the end of the tunnel on this project. (I called Lisa to remind her that her tables are coming, and she had understandably forgotten that they were even in the works.)  

Back to dragonflies

 

 

After being wadded into a bag for months and months, I finally dragged my tablecloth for Lisa's summer out into the light of day and began to embroider the dragonflies. It was a nightmare. I had envisioned the wings done in silver thread and was excited to find a couple of options at my local fabric store but the DMC silver that looked the best was hard to work with. No knots could be counted on to stay and the thread frayed badly so I had to work with very short lengths, hence more knots. Aargh. Embroidering the insect bodies in two grayish shades was like going on vacation after the wings. I got them finished and then began to worry about what the silver thread might do under the iron, having forgotten to test this before the marathon struggle. Fortunately the silver behaves very well even when the temperature is quite high. Whew. I used my few remaining scraps of harem cloth behind the dragonflies to stabilize them and I hope they will not pucker the fabric around them too much as the needlework goes on.

The next step is to add a gray and white checked border around the outside. This is supposed to be a summer tablecloth and was intended to be quite a bit lighter in the beginning, but the dyeing came out darker than I meant. I still like it, but I think it needs something to make it more lighthearted and checks remind me of summer picnics, so I've scrounged all the gray and white scraps I can find and sewn them into this alternating ladder, which will then be cut into a two and a half inch strips for the border. Getting the strips straight has led to lots of thread pulling to produce reliable and uniform (eventual) squares.