Crab Needlepoint

This was my first needlepoint piece.. It turned out to be a perfect quarantine companion; an easy pattern to follow with large blocks of color. Repetitive stitching on a counted grid provided gentle way to be creative during some of the worst weeks of quarantine.

With the needlepoint part of the project complete, I’m going to eventually sew this into a pillow, likely using fabric like a stiff cotton canvas / duck on the back panel to match the weight of the front panel.

Pattern: Tina the Crab kit by Emily Peacock

New skills: Needlepoint

Lessons: Worsted weight yarn can actually have a fair amount of variation in its thickness, which causes the canvas to slightly show. The kit used 2 different brands of yarn (Appletons and Anchor) so I suspect there might be a difference in consistency/quality between them.

How you position your blocks of stitches can matter a lot:

1. If there are no stitches to the left of a block, the first stitch will be slightly larger because it expands into the empty canvas square to its left. This isn’t an issue on the edge of a piece, but if the area to the left is later filled in, those earlier stitches will continue to appear a little larger. As a result, consistently working left to right when filling in a large block of color results in a cleaner final product.

2. A slight vertical seam tends to be visible between adjacent blocks of stitches. I haven’t done a lot of reading into how to prevent this, but it will be something I research more fully before a future project.

I practiced weaving in the beginning and end of each piece of yarn to keep the back of the piece clean and tidy. It was effort well-spent and I’ll keep doing this in the future.

What I’d do differently: There’s a single stitch in a dark section where I accidentally went over 2 squares instead of one, however it’s barely noticeable and wasn’t easily correctable.

Apply the knowledge above and do some research on how to successfully position blocks of stitches to get a clean, seamless look.

Care: Spot clean only, using warm water.

Blackwork Gradient

This project was started while reckoning with the injustice of systemic racism and processing a family tragedy. For a few days all I could do was stitch tiny black circles and hold space for grief.

Pattern: Blackwork Gradient by Purple Rose Embroidery

New skills: Blackwork embroidery, finishing embroidery on hoops.

Lessons: Stitch using a hoop 1 inch larger than the pattern calls for, and then transfer the finished work to a the recommended hoop size, to ensure clean borders. This was the first time I’ve left a finished embroidery piece on the hoop, and this tutorial was an excellent resource on how to trim and hide the cross stitch canvas.

This was also the first time I used Anchor embroidery floss. It worked well enough but it seemed to be fuzzier than DMC floss, so for future projects I’ll use DMC.

What I’d do differently: Next time I’ll start stitching from the middle of the pattern so that I end up with symmetrical edges—my design is slightly off center.

Because this piece was going to stay on the hoop I wasn’t very diligent about minimizing knots on the back of the work. I didn’t encounter any problems with this, but I’d like to work on the habit of weaving in the beginning/end of threads.