The rest of the ferns

I hadn't realised it's been such a long time since my last post - sorry about that.  Time does seem to fly, doesn't it!

Since then, I've finished the rest of the ferns for the second Banner panel.  Here's the transfer for them:

I made these transfers quite a long time ago, and it looks as though while doing them, I realised that I'd been doing too many individual leaves, and after the first one, started doing fewer.  I wish I'd remembered that when I first came to stitch them!

Here they are stitched:

There's just the second foxglove to go now, and I've already made a start on it, so hopefully it shouldn't be too long before you hear from me again!

Cowslips

The left Banner panel has a cowslip in the centre, the same as the bottom one, which again consists of three flower heads in different sizes, the smallest being about 2.5cm (1") across.  All threads and techniques are the same as before.

Here's the linen with the transfer on it, framed up and ready to go:

I'd traced the flowers as they appear on the design, but I feel that with all the flower heads, it looks a bit heavy and some of the definition is lost, so I'm leaving one out in each case.  These have a pencil cross through them, as a reminder to myself not to go ahead and stitch them in a fit of absent-mindedness.

So, with the little green cups at the base of each individual flower stitched:

Then the flowers themselves:

As with the earlier cowslip, I filled the little gaps between the individual flowers that are too small to cut out with split stitches in a red to match the velvet:

Finally, I worked the leaves, so here's the full thing, completed:

 The embroidery for the second panel is coming along very well - I think I'm slightly ahead of schedule!

A cultural morning

Taking a morning off from sewing, I went to see a new exhibition from the National Portrait Gallery at the gallery at Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens.  This is entitled 'Writers of influence', and ranges from Chaucer to J K Rowling, via Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolfe and Dizzee Rascal (plus many others).  They're all fascinating to see, but the real star of the show, and what looks like making the exhibition a real blockbuster, is the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare.

This is the only portrait of him that has 'any claim to have been painted from life', as the caption put it, which is as good as we're going to get, and good enough for me.

This is quite a coup for the gallery as this is the first time ever that it's been displayed outside of London, and as something of a Shakespeare fan, I was determined to see it today, the exhibition's opening.  There were a lot of people there, most hearteningly of all a bunch of teenage boys.  They weren't on a school trip (it's Saturday), and they weren't there with their parents, they'd come along because they wanted to.  Maybe our culture's in safer hands than we give it credit for.

Photos weren't allowed in the gallery, of course, but outside in Mowbray Park, I did take one of a rather different literary figure: the Walrus.

Lewis Carroll (also in the exhibition) had family and friends in Sunderland, and stayed here often.  On one visit, he went to see the skin of a walrus, being displayed to the public by a sea captain (you had to make your own entertainment in those days).  Sunderland had a massive shipbuilding industry, and he would have seen many men heading to work in the shipyards.  They were wooden ships, and the men were woodworkers, or, of course, carpenters.  So, The Walrus and the Carpenter, surreal as it is, was directly inspired by Sunderland people and things.  Carroll's work was an influence on John Lennon, who wrote I am the Walrus.  He's in the exhibition too.

The walrus skin was stuffed and was on display in the museum for a century or so before finally falling apart; when I was a kid the head, mounted on a plaque, was still proudly displayed over the door.  That's had it too now, so a life-size bronze statue was commissioned in its stead.

Walking back through the park, I passed the statue of Jack Crawford, the 'Hero of Camperdown', and the boy who quite literally nailed the flag, or the colours, to the mast during a sea battle, giving us an enduring expression.

The inscription on the sculpture in the foreground reads:

'On open seas

or dry land

nail your colours

to the mast'

There'll be an exhibiton on in your local museum or art gallery or library, and it'll be every bit as interesting as this one and will tell you just as much about where you live.  Go and see it.

Gibside Chapel

You've been following me for some time now using split stitch to give (hopefully!) realistic shading to the Banner's flowers, but I've also used it for some small landscapes, including one of Gibside Chapel.

Gibside, on the outskirts of Gateshead, is now a National Trust property; most of the buildings are sadly now ruined, but the pretty Palladian chapel is still in good order, and the gardens and landscaping are beautiful.

As part of an outreach initiative, local craft groups, including the Embroiderers' Guild, were invited to spend a Bank Holiday weekend at the Chapel, giving demonstrations and answering visitors' questions.  As part of that, I decided to stitch a picture of the Chapel itself.

I took a photo of the Chapel from the front, and traced the basic outlines to form the design, which I then ironed onto linen.  Using the same split stitch shading techniques that I'm now using for the flowers, I could then fill in the areas for the sky (a rather sunnier blue than the reality!), the grass, including the shade under the trees, and most of the architectural detail of the building itself.

The trees and final detailing on the building were done with French knots, and some back stitch with a single strand of cotton for outlining.

Apart from a bit of artistic licence with the sky, I tried to keep the colours as close to the ones in the photo as possible; my hope was to produce what looked like a miniature painting, but in stitch.

Foxgloves

We have a new flower! The side panels have a flower on them that the top and bottom panels don't, the foxglove (Digitalis purpurea).  Foxgloves are most commonly purple, but a wild subspecies, D. purpurea, subsp. heywoodii, has ivory or pale yellow flowers.

Here's the basic design, transferred onto linen:

I'm not sure why I added those dots to the transfer as they're just going to be stitched over, but never mind.  They do act as a reminder that something needs to go there!  There are a series of flower heads, which will all be attached to the same stem, with the largest flowers at the bottom and the smallest buds at the top.

As the flowers in the wild are very pale, I'm using the palest threads in my palette to stitch them. This means that they don't show up too well against the white linen, so sorry about that, but they'll be fine on the red velvet backing fabric.

Starting with the cups at the base of the buds, I used my palest green, Madeira stranded cotton 1409, to both outline them in buttonhole stitch and fill them in in split stitch.

For the buds and flowers themselves, I'm using two shades, 0101, which is a pale ivory colour, and 0103, which is a very pale yellow.  I've used these colours before on the Banner, for the pearlworts, so using them in combination again helps keep a consistent look.  In case you're wondering why I didn't use 0102, while it's a very nice colour by itself, it has rather a peachy tone, which doesn't go at all with any of the other shades of yellow that I've used so far, or with the particular greens that I'm using either.  So far, with the split stitch shading, I've always been careful to use two colours next to each other on the shade card, to give as soft a gradation as possible; even though 0101 and 0103 (obviously) aren't next to one another, both 0102 and 0103 differ in the depth of their shade from 0101 by a similar amount.  In other words, 0103 is just as pale as 0102, just a slightly different colour, and one I think works better.

Back to the stitching.  I used the ivory 0101 to outline the flowers, and I filled in the body of the side-on buds at the same time:

Foxglove flowers are relatively long and bell-shaped, and I want to give the impression that my flowers have an interior that you can look into.  As of course they're actually flat, I need to try and achieve this with shading.  To start with, I defined the inner edge of the 'bell', with buttonhole stitch:

Again using 0101, I filled in the top lip of the bell, above the buttonhole-stitched 'edge', and also along the bottom, real, edge:

The stitches along the top are parallel to the edge of the flower, while the ones along the bottom are perpendicular to it.  This should help with the shading, and give contrast between the outside and interior of the flower.

I then used one strand of 0101 and one of 0103 to fill in the centre of the smaller circular buds, part of the interior of the bell-shaped flowers, and all of the exterior:

For some reason, this looks a much brighter yellow in the photo than it does in real life; it's actually much more subdued than this.

Finally, I used two strands of 0103 to fill in the rest of the interior of the flowers.

There's still something missing, though.  Remember the dots on the transfer?  Foxgloves have small spots on their interior surface, mostly towards the rim, in a slightly darker colour to the rest, and these now needed to be added.  My first thought was to use French knots, and I started to do this, but it looked terrible, so they came out again (I should have taken a photo to show you how bad it looked, but I didn’t think of that until it was too late.  Sorry).  Instead, I added small stitches, just a millimetre or so across, in the next shade up, 0104:

So with that done, here are all the completed foxglove flowers:

I'm very pleased with how they've turned out - I think they do have a sense of depth about them.  What do you think?

Half the ferns

There are quite a lot of ferns on the side panels, and I'm afraid they're still not my favourite to do.  The eagle-eyed amongst you when studying the Banner design may have counted up nine ferns on the left panel.  If so, you either more eagle-eyed or better at arithmetic than me, as I managed to miscount the number on the bottom panel and stitched one more than I needed to.  I was annoyed about this at first, until it occurred to me that it meant I had one less to stitch later on.  So, carrying that one over, I just have eight to do now instead.

And here are half of them:

When stitching the previous lot of ferns onto the background fabric of the bottom panel, I was struggling to fit all of the leaves into the space, and in all bar one case, left one leaf out.  So, I'm going to miss out one leaf per fern at the stitching stage this time, which is why the bottom one is crossed out.  I thought I'd better leave myself a prominent reminder, or I'd end up stitching them anyway by mistake!

So, having found a way to save myself a bit of work at least, here they all are:

There's still another four to do, but at least that's half of them out of the way.

Next, it's a brand new flower, the foxglove.

A sheet of wood avens

There's just the one sheet of wood avens for the left panel, and here it is:

There aren't any here of the largest size that we had on the bottom panel, but there is one of the tiny ones, which is very fiddly to do.

As before, they're outlined in buttonhole stitch, filled in with split stitch, and have centres in French knots.  Here they are, completed:

Some rather disappointing news is that the Spirograph panels failed to sell, so I'll be getting them back, as the gallery need the space for their next exhibition.  Oh well, maybe next time...