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June 2013 New Needlepoint Products

June 10, 2013 by · Leave a Comment

folk art chicken needlepoint from quail run

With a big TNNA Market later this month, many companies are releasing new products that are perfect for needlepointers.

Canvases & Charts

Quail Run has delightful primative red chicken, pictured here, that comes with a stitch guide featuring great stitches and lots of texture. In addition they have a 12″ square magnolia pillow on 13 mesh.

Machelle Somerville’s canvases, distributed by Fleur de Paris, are very popular. Her new design is a whimsical, colorful tree that has a mid-centiry modern color scheme. Also distributed by Fleur is Sandra Gilmore’s magnificent London window canvas. One of my favorite things about it is the needlepoint pillow covered sofa.

I love JulieMar’s five canvas Geometric Letter Box. Available in 13 or 18 mesh, the group can be used together to create a box or used separately. They come with stitch guides. JulieMar also has a delightful series of puppies in bags that can be finished as stand-ups.

Leigh Designs has added a new Femme Fatale, Lil, to the line. Jean Smith also had new canvases including a series of tropical gardens with a more abstract style. She has not neglected more traditional canvases as well, I especially like the cosmos beatuties with several flowers in different colors.

Silver Needle has added three new canvases adapted from the designs of Hadley Pottery. The snowman, Santa, and Christmas tree are in the traditional Hadley color palette. Susan Roberts has a set for a child’s director’s chair of planes, trains, boats, and cars.

Kelly Clark has introduced several new Halloweenies characters. She also has nine new Christmas pears. Squigee Designs has a new series of adorable Kewpie Dolls. Needledeeva has a series of 56 new Halloween canvases. Among them are Halloween Hi Fashion Shoes. These high heels feature seasonal motifs and colors.

j. child has a charming 6×17 canvas of goldfish in a fish tank. They also have a lovely dogwood branch full of blossoms. It’s is available in several sizes: 12″ pillow, brick cover, eyeglass case, 4″ insert, bookmark, and 5×7 pillow.

In addition to her lovely birdhouse series, Melissa Prince Designs has a series of six carousel horses, many designed to honor holidays. Dream House Ventures has created several canvases based on motifs from Turkish and Bedouin carpets.

Elizabeth Turner has a great ornament for lovers of horses or horse racing. It’s a horse’s head framed by a horseshoe. The company also has a pirate-themed tooth fairy pillow — with the treasure chest as the pocket! There is also a first Christmas ornament that looks as if it’s from a vintage kid’s book.

Brenda Kocher has a new charted design in a muted patriotic palette called Majors & Masters. Handbleesings gas a great chart plus charm called Cubistic Color Wheel. DebBee’s Designs’ new project is Garden of Silken Delights, featuring Treenway Silks.

Other Products

Puffin & Company is launching three new styles. There’s a dragonfly sitter and a sunflower needle minder. Also new is Sarah’s Choice quilt block as a needle nanny. They were introduced at the Quilt Market last month, so look for them in your local shops.

Hug Me Products has added a small snap try to their line. It’s available in every fabric. They also have a new bag shape, the CarryAll, available in three sizes. They also have a new zipped rectangular tool case.

Painter’s Thread has introduced a new thread. Rayon Gimp is a cotton cord wrapped with rayon. It’s a soft but flexible cord and is available in all colors. Gentle Art has three new floss colors: Country Redwood, Silver Fern, and Mediterranean Sea.

Nordic Needle has a charming jeweled flower needle minder that comes in three colors. Michelle Ink Designs has a new line of needleminders create from precious metal clay.

Sulky has some intriguing new products. They are making a spray-on temporary adhesive that you can use to stick drawings onto canvas to make tracing easier. Fabri-Solvy is a water-soluable sheet you run through on your printer. It’s sticky so it attaches to you canvas and then dissolves when wet. THey als haver new iron-on transfer pens. Watch for upcoming reviews of these products.

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Scrappy Squares Needlepoint Quilt

May 22, 2013 by · Leave a Comment

scrappy squares needlepoint quilt free project, designed by needlepoint expert janet m. perry

Use solid threads from your stash to make this needlepoint quilt portrait.

Scrappy Squares Needlepoint Quilt is a quilt portrait needlepoint. I love patchwork and quilts but don’t have the sewing ability to make them. Therefore, using quilts as my inspiration I turn them into needlepoint. Many of my free projects on this blog, as well as ebooks and club projects draw on this rich store of boldly graphic designs.

This design is based on squares that are multiples of each other. That’s easy to do in needlepoint with Box Stitches. A Mosaic Stitch is twice the size of a Tent Stitch. A Scotch Stitch over 4 threads is twice the size if a Mosaic Stitch. A bigger Scotch (or in this case a Mosaic in a Diagonal Gobelin border) is twice the size of the first Scotch.

Knowing this you can mix and match squares to create a lively design.

This quilt uses all solid colors. If you chose to use hand-dyes, as I did, you will mimic the slightly shaded look of batik quilting fabrics.

To make this piece you will need:

  • 5×7 piece 18-mesh mono canvas
  • at least 12 colors of solid or hand-dyed threads
  • a metallic thread in an accent color (optional)
  • a border color (optional)

Most of the threads I used were Dinky Dyes stranded silk. A few colors of Grandeur were used, and white Crystal Braid was my accent thread.

The design is 32 stitches wide and 48 stitches wide without the border. To make it fit into a 2″x3″ frame I added a row of Tent in the metallic at the top and bottom and a two row border of Diagonal Gobelin around the entire piece. Although I chose to use one of my main colors for the border, another color could be used that does not appear in the quilt.

Your choice for what color should go in each square should be picked at random from among your palette of colors. Just don’t put the same or similar colors next to each other.

Instead of a complete diagram of the quilt you’ll find a map below. A single square on this map is a Mosaic Stitch. Most groupings of four squares of the same color are Scotch Stitches over four threads. Among these there are a few blocks of four Mosaic Stitches in the same color (you can see these in the finished stitching). Eight blocks together in the same color are the Mosaic-Diagonal Gobelin BLocks.

scrappy squares needlepoint quilt free design chart, designed by needlepoint expert janet m. perry

One square on this needlepoint map equals one 2×2 thread square, i.e. one Mosaic Stitch.

The original quilt had very simple stitching and quilting which is why these stitches are flat. If you’d like more texture or variety you can substitute other stitches covering the same area.

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New Bargello from Liz Morrow

May 18, 2013 by · Leave a Comment

Bargello Needlepoint Crackers from Liz Morrow

Bargello Crackers from Liz Morrow

For lovers of Bargello Needlepoint there can be nothing finer than new projects. That there are four lovely ones is even better. The four have two groups of small projects (crackers and hearts) and two larger projects, including the one on the cover of the most recent Needlepointers.

Even better there is a charming free design of a fish.

You can find them all on her Bargello & Needlepoint 2 page.

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Great Idea for Small Pieces — Stitch a Garland

May 4, 2013 by · Leave a Comment

b42d2b9863ae2c8f3072a50dd94f292f

Small needlepoint projects are always popular, but a bigger problem is figuring out what to do with them.

If you stitch holiday-themed pieces you can, at least, put many of them out as decorations. But what do you do when the tree (or trees) are dripping with needlepoint, you have stockings for everyone, but you still love those small projects.

The folks at the Florida shop, Needle Nicely, have been working on a marvelous idea; they have been stitching starfish to make a garland.They are not using painted canvases to do it but drawing the shape on canvas and then filling it with an interesting stitch.

Even if you use another shape, you could easily adopt this idea as the basis of your own garland.Just find a shape and fill it.

Recently they put up a post that is of tremendous help in planning this kind of project. It discusses how to plan the finishing so the garland will look nice.

This advice is great for any project where you will be doing a group of items that will be displayed together.

To this I’d add some additional steps in planning.

Think out your unifying theme. For this garland it’s starfish shapes. But any grouping should have something that unifies them. If you have lots of pieces, it can be eclectic (look at my mini-socks garland pictured here). If it’s designed as a set, the unifier is already there. You can use that as a jumping off point to extend the idea.

Often the unifying theme is not enough. You should look to other aspects: color, one stitch (not Tent) used in every piece), similar cording, the same type of embellishment, etc. The more the pieces of needlepoint look as if they go together, the better your finished garland will look.

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House Update

April 13, 2013 by · Leave a Comment

Originally posted 2008-12-06 09:16:57. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

We made an offer on a house last night and should know by Wednesday at the latest if we have it. If all goes as planned, we will be moved in by early January.

I’ll keep you updated on the progress as well as when I’m likely to be out of commission because I’m between internet providers and therefore dependent on friends, the library, and Kinko’s for access.

For those who have asked, we are moving to Mare Island, which was the first US Naval base on the Pacific Coast. It’s near the Carquinez Straights in the northeast part of the SF Bay. It’s called Mare Island because the last Mexican governor of California, Mariano Vallejo, lost a mare off a ship and she was found on the Island.

Another cool thing about the Island is that it has trees from all over the world, since a Commandant in the late 19th Century asked ships coming there for maintenance and repair to bring him trees.

And like that other big island in the SF Bay, I think it’s madly charming.

Now back to needlepoint.

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Making Realistic Needlepoint Cords

April 9, 2013 by · Leave a Comment

needlepoint electric cord

Wrapping threads creates a realistic twisty cord in needlepoint.

Great as they are wired threads such as DMC’s Memory Thread or Kreinik’s Hot Wire don’t work for every application.

If, as is the case here, the “wire” twist tightly and meanders all over the place, these threads won’t work for making realistic needlepoint cords. At best, it will be heavy going.

That’s when it’s time to use the tried-and-true method of covering thread with thread. I used this method on this Ashley Bradley mini-sock to make the Christmas lights a focal point of the piece.

Because your stitches will not all be oriented the same way it’s critical that you use the same thread, or at worst exactly matching colors, for both the couched thread and the couching thread. You could use two different threads if colors and textures matched.

Unlike in padding, your thread may not cover the couched thread completely, so this is another reason matching threads are important.

Because the slant of the covering stitches will change as the curve changes, darker threads will look smoother and more realistic than lighter threads. With this matte black thread, Grandeur, the cord looks solid, not stitched.

You will need to use a round, thread, appropriate for that canvas. Grandeur is a #5 pearl, so it’s perfect for 18-mesh. You will also need to have two needles. Some kind of tool, such as a Needle Valet, to park thread ends would also be helpful.

Begin by bringing your thread out of the canvas, return it into the canvas at the end of the line. Lines end when they go behind other areas of the canvas. Notice that the thread has taken the shortest route, a straight line, between the points. So that you have plenty of thread to use to move the couched thread, let your needle and thread hang free or attach them loosely to the Needle Valet.

Beginning where your needle came out of the canvas and using a second needle and length of thread, couch down the first thread by stitching across its width at every intersection. These will be Tent and Reverse Tent Stitches. As you make these stitches you will have to move the couched thread to be sure the Tent Stitch goes over it. I do this by making sure that thread’s tension is loose nad then moving the couched thread into position so my stitch will cross it.

The technique differs significantly from whipped stitches. In those stitches the initial stitches are made to make a straight line. Then they are wrapped to make it solid. Here the couched thread creates the solid line as wel as the padding. The couching stitches do not make a solid line.

One final note. If your line has something attached to it, such as the lights here, make sure the cord actually touches these. Otherwise it will look unrealistic.

The result is a thick solid curvy line, much more round and thick than you get with Whipped Backstitch. You’ll love what I do for the plug in tomorrow’s post.

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Winter Wreath — See it All!

April 7, 2013 by · Leave a Comment

Originally posted 2008-03-06 06:09:30. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Tish has posted a picture and an entry about the Winter Wreath on her blog.

Go visit it to see how the whole thing looks, instead of the bits and pieces I could get on my scanner.

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Learn a Needlepoint Stitch Owl – Free Project

March 15, 2013 by · Leave a Comment

March learn-a-stitch needlepoint owl, free project designed by needlepoint expert janet m. perry

March Owl

Green hand-dyed canvas creates a lovely underpinning for this month’s owl. You could also use sage green canvas or the green vintage canvas.

In this piece I used

  • Watercolours in Potpourri
  • Dinky Dyes silk in 69 Swan Valley
  • overdyed #8 perle cotton, probably Needle Necessities
  • Grandeur in G826
  • Olde Willow Stitchery Linen in 225L Rebekkah Green (no longer made)
  • two four-hole gray buttons

Trace the outline of the owl onto your canvas. Remember that the owls and the tip of the top triangle are represented by dots and transfer them as well. From the middle dot, draw two diagonal lines to make the top triangle.

Make the eyes by attaching the buttons at the dots.

Stitch the triangle in Tiny Knitting, below. This stitch really looks like knitting because the slant of the stitch changes in each column.

tiny knitting, tent stitch variation, diagrammed by needlepoint expert janet m. perry

Tiny Knitting

Stitch the face in AA Variation, below. This is a Skip Tent variation from Julia Key Snyder’s book Backgrounds & Such. Make each of the short rows as Backstitch, i.e. in straight lines.

aa-variation, stitch from Julia Key Snyder, diagrammed by janet m. perry

AA Variation

Stitch the left side of the body in Moorish Variation, below. I used Watercolours for the Diagonal Scotch and Dinky Dyes for the Tent.

moorish variation stitch for needlepoint

Moorish Variation

Stitch the right side of the body in Clapboard Gobelin, below. I used Watercolours for the Tent and Grandeur for the Gobelins.

clapboard gobelin, diagrammed by needlepoint expert janet m. perry

Clapboard Gobelin

Follow the entire series on-line:

  • January
  • February
  • March
  • April
  • May
  • June
  • July
  • August
  • September
  • October
  • November
  • December

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Merry Christmas

March 10, 2013 by · Leave a Comment

Originally posted 2010-12-25 07:50:20. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

A Blessed Christmas to you all!

I’m hoping that as you are reading this I’m sleeping. We had Midnight Mass last night, actually at Midnight, so I got to bed a little late.

I’m going to open presents, eat too much, and enjoy the holiday.

Back with new posts on Monday!

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Finishing, Books, Canvases and More at TNNA

February 6, 2013 by · Leave a Comment

Sew Much Fun has a lovely lined Ultrasuede tote that holds an 8″ square canvas. It comes in red, teal, blue and green with coordinating linings.

Amanda Lawford has a new box, available in six colors, that has a rectangular opening and a pretty scalloped edge. They also have a tote with space for a rectangular needlepoint in front.

The folks at Little House of Canvas have a new book out, Ins & Outs. It will be released in 4-6 weeks. It covers stitches for interiors & exteriors. dede Ogden has her second book on Shadow Stitching out. It’s called That’s Not Needlepoint:  Shadow Stitches Accelerated Series 2. Since she pioneered this technique, I’m really looking forward to seeing it.

Lantern Moon has expanded their selection of needlework accessories with a cupcake-shaped tool holder. The velvet top is shaped like a rose. You can insert tools such as scissors or laying tools in the folds.

DC Designs has two ornaments one of the US Capital and one of the Statue of Liberty, not in white silhouette on a snowy background. Zecca has new mini skulls a new clock and new growth chart. Joining the wonderful thistle I wrote about last week, they also have a sunflower.

Maggie Co. has five new cats in hats from Ginny Diezel. There are also several delightful canvases with dogs, cats or both by Peter Adderly, as well as landscapes by Annie Catherine. I really loved the baking and cooking canvases from Melvyn Evans. Also by Ginny Diezel is a series of nine snowmen in star that are quite charming.

A new artist named Beth has a cute dog and two lovely birds, a toucan and a blue parrot. In Barbara Elmore’s Mrs. Birdy collection there are five canvases. Besides reading, you can find her cooking, buying a hat, and more. I just love these.

Besides the Baby’s first Christmas ornaments I told you about, Patti Mann has several other canvases perfect for newborns, including several adorable Baby’s Sleeping signs. In addition to the high heels, Lani’s has a lovely series of bird and flower botanicals. They have the feeling of something from another time and are serene and lovely.

dede has three delightful covers for old-fashioned straw brooms. They are so pretty you won’t want to use the brooms, but hang them up instead. she also has a great new series of owls. In another great series from Fleur de Paris, there are several canvases with very witty sayings about wine. Lots of people look for wine-themed canvases and these make a great addition. I’d finish them as trays with needlepoint insets.

Mindy has some lovely new pieces including an elaborate oriental design with a two-layer ceramic embellishment. A blue lovbirds floral has a muylti-layer felt flower in the center. She also has new clocks that come with hands and embellishments for the numbers.

Labors of Love has new clip-on ornaments (besides their popular birds) including series based on retro shaped lightbulbs and a series of fish. I just love non=needlepoint clip-on ornaments, so I could seriously get into these. They also have an amazing, realistic series of portraits of Henry VIII and each of his wives. Finally they have a lovely two-sided Egyptian-style fan. It’s in muted colors and comes with a gold handle.

Kelly Clark has recently redesigned her website and has added tons of lovely new stuff. She has a new 12 figure nativity set, smaller than her previous set but just as charming. She also has a new booklet on stumpwork out that uses her sweet pea sampler (look for a review soon). There is a new monthly series of angels (March is my favorite) and new Halloween pears. She has also added matching breast cancer awareness pears and apples. For those wanting to make a special sticking but don’t want to commit to a big project she has several new stocking cuffs with both modern and traditional themes. Last but not least she has a simply delightful new shape — top hats. There are six in the first group including stripes, patchwork, snowflakes, and damask.

In canvases I saw in pictures, but where the designers weren’t identified, I saw a marvelous baseball flag that replaced the stars and made the stripes out of baseballs. How about lovely realistic hearts and fleurs de lys that were animal skins (zebra, giraffe, tiger, etc.)? Someone did a charming German feather tree in black with Halloween ornaments on it.

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