Landscapes in Needlework: Part I

Mountain sunset photo by J.J.

I’m attracted to landscapes, both to look at and to create. I’m especially attracted to landscapes sculpted by wind and water, ice and fire. The kinds that don’t easily accommodate the priorities of humanity. The kinds of landscapes that change the people who choose to live in them — rather than the other way around. Mountains and deserts, canyons and seacoasts — enduring places. Sometimes my depictions are realistic, based on sketches and photographs of specific locations. Sometimes they are composites, based on the characteristics of a region, rather than a single location. Sometimes they are impressions, based on sensations and emotions as much as on memory. And sometimes my landscapes are completely imaginary. We are going to examine each of these kinds of landscape over the next chapters, as well as seascapes, skyscapes, and cityscapes. Let’s begin with a realistic landscape.

This is Delicate Arch, the iconic rock formation from Arches National Monument near Moab, Utah, just an easy day trip from where we live. The reason that this landmark is so readily recognizable is that there are limited viewpoints where a person can sit or stand safely and in relative comfort to view, sketch, or photograph the arch in its entirety. Most people visit the area in the summer, when the sun beats down like a hammer of brass. But, despite its high desert location, in late spring or early autumn it is possible to encounter an out-of-season snow shower. Few people visit it in winter, although this is changing because of creative advertising. Both the arch and its surroundings are spectacular in the snow. I chose to present it as a wintry scene with a winter storm in the background. I love the drama of stormy skies and like to incorporate them into my artwork. As for the viewer, you may consider the storm as approaching or moving away, whichever you prefer.

Detail of Delicate Arch rug

The ‘medium’ in which this work was created is cut acrylic rug yarn on jute rug canvas, and the technique is latch-hooking. The Impressionists, especially the pointillists, discovered that they got the most realistic colors by combining small amounts of color next to each other, rather than blended together. The pointillists did this with tiny dots of color. Latch-hooking is pure pointillism because each piece of rug yarn produces a “dot” on the canvas. This allowed me, for example, to indicate the many colors in the banded sandstone that makes up the arch.

To download, click here

I make a number of sketches and line drawings before I begin a project of this size. Here is one of the early line drawings I made to establish the proportions I wanted in the final design. It really emphasizes the collection of rock formations that make up the arch. Download it if you like and use it as the basis for a needlework landscape in your choice of “medium”.

The next picture is a composite landscape. The ridgeline is real. The saguaro cactuses and their companion plants are real. They are just more distant from each other than they appear here. In other words, there is no place where a person can stand and see this exact landscape. Nor would easterly sunlight cast these exact shadows on the rocks at sunrise. The ‘medium’ here is Persian wool yarn on #10 needlepoint canvas. The technique is tent stitch in both continental and basket-weave. Some of the colors are achieved by blending two or three shades of yarn in each stitch. Again, this is related to the technique the pointillists achieved with their dots of color.

"Sunrise on Saguaro" -  needlepoint landscape

To make a blended yarn, you need to begin with yarns that divide easily. Most common yarns have 3 or 4 strands (called plies) that separate fairly easily. These are called 3-ply and 4-ply yarns and include tapestry and crewel yarns, as well as the heavier knitting weights. Novelty yarns are not as easy to separate. You can usually determine whether a yarn will separate by examining the end of the yarn. You should be able to see the separate fibers, or plies. Spread them apart with your fingertips. If they spread apart easily, cut a length of the yarn. See if you can gently pull two strands free. Then separate the two strands from each other in the same way. You should now have either 3 or 4 individual strands of yarn.

Detail of needlepoint, showing blended yarns

Just because a yarn separates easily, however, doesn’t mean that it will be suitable for blending. Wrap the ends of a strand around your hands. Pull, twist, and tug it to make sure it doesn’t fray. If it doesn’t, it should be a good yarn for blending. Here is a close-up view of blended stitching.

The last project is a landscape that captures the essence of an area and a season without portraying a specific place. It is done in “quickpoint”. Quickpoint is a form of needlework that I recommend to several groups of people. First of all, to beginning needleworkers. It is easy to do and results are achieved quickly. Almost any kind of design can be adapted for the technique. A second group for whom quickpoint is appropriate is that of creative people who have limited time to do projects. The final group would be people who once enjoyed needlework, but who now find that their eyes and hands do not respond as well as they once did. I belong to that group myself. Please don’t give up an activity that you love. Find less physically demanding ways to work.

Cross-stitch on #5 rug canvas

Quickpoint is large and the canvas mesh is easy to see. The needles are large and have eyes that are easy to thread. The yarns are thick and cover the canvas quickly. Projects can be any size that is easy for you to hold. The “point” in “quickpoint” implies that it is only done in needlepoint. This is misleading. Although it is done on canvas, quickpoint is also lovely done in counted cross-stitch, as I have done here.

Traditional quickpoint canvas has 4.5 stitches to the inch. I don’t have a source for this canvas at the moment, so I can’t show it to you. I can, however, show you a larger-mesh canvas and a smaller-mesh canvas, both of which work well for quickpoint. The canvas with the larger squares is #3.75 latch-hook rug canvas. It can be worked in uncut rug yarn or any of the many thick craft or novelty yarns. The canvas with the smaller squares is #5 canvas, also a rug canvas, but one that requires a special hook.

#3.75 and #5 rug canvas

You can use two strands of knitting worsted or several strands of tapestry or crewel yarns on the canvas. For the best results, do not double any of the yarns; instead, cut multiple separate strands of the same length. Thread them through the eye of a rug needle or a chenille needle. Some of these materials can be hard to find. Good places to look for them if you cannot find them at yarn or needlework shops are: second-hand stores, thrift and charity shops, yard or garage sales.

When working on a large cross-stitch design like this one, I often make a detailed chart first. I prefer to do a full-color chart with a colored square for each cross-stitch. Since I was planning to make a wall hanging, I made a large outline drawing of my original sketch. I started by taping several pieces of quarter-inch graph paper together and trimming them to the same relative proportions as the sketch I had drawn. Beginning at the bottom of the paper, I drew in the outlines from my drawing. Using that as a framework, I colored the segments of my design with markers. The squares on the graph paper each represented a cross-stitch I intended to make on a square of canvas.

Annake working on the quickpoint landscape

I measured and cut the canvas so that I had as many squares to work on as there were squares on the graph paper — plus a small margin along both sides. I chose acrylic yarns that matched the colors of my chart as closely as possible. Beginning at the bottom row of the design, I made one cross stitch for each square on my paper pattern. The sizes of the squares of the graph paper are a little larger than the stitches on the canvas, but they are still close enough to be easy to work from. Here is a picture of me stitching on the canvas (below) while looking at my hand-drawn colored chart (above).

Detail showing range of colors used

The colors of the yarns are more vivid than the colors of the markers I used on the chart, but they are still in the same color range. The picture shows tall evergreen trees on both sides of a small mountain stream. Sky and clouds show above the stream, More distant trees mark the horizon. The snowbanks along the stream are beginning to thaw and water is pooling at the bottom of the picture. The darker blues, grays, greens and violets in the lower part of the scene emphasize the cold of lingering Winter, while the lighter blues of the sky and the warmer whites of the clouds offer a promise of Spring.

Cart with chart and quickpoint in progress

I “re-purposed” a small rolling cart from my kitchen to hold my chart above my canvas. The chart was rolled and taped to the top edge of the upper “basket” of the cart. The canvas was rolled on a piece of plastic pipe that rests on the second level, or “basket”, of the cart. The two bottom levels held my yarns. I secured the canvas to the plastic tube with masking tape so that I could work on one section at a time. I rolled up the canvas each time I stopped working on it in order to keep it clean. Here is a picture of the cart as it looked when in use.

The edges of the finished canvas were turned under and stitched down. The work was backed with a large piece of blue felt. Enough felt was extended at the top to make a pocket for a dowel. After the dowel was inserted in the pocket, two large wooden beads that had been painted to match the felt were glued to the ends of the dowel, which rests on two slender nails that do not show past the beads. The entire piece measures 31 inches long by 13 inches wide (79 cm long X 33 cm wide). Here's a picture of the finished work, I call it “Spring Thaw”.

Finished quickpoint landscape, "Spring Thaw"

One of the things I want you to notice about these pictures and the ones that will follow them is the position of the horizon, the place where the land (or sea) meets the sky. Study the ways in which those positions influence the composition of the pictures. Remember that we have demonstrated that all of our landscapes do not have to be real, horizontal, framed, or hung on walls.

*Some content in this post has been presented previously, in a different form.
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