Wrapping Up the Season: Late Fall Q &A, 2018

Before I begin with recent questions, I want to pass along two items of interest from a benefit show and sale for a local animal shelter that we took part in a few days ago.

A charming couple purchased several of my puppets for their children. They said they planned to fill the bodies and arms of the puppets with "stocking stuffers" like candy, money, miniature toys and games, etc., and sew them shut with an easy-to-pull thread. Then the children would each have a puppet to play with after they had enjoyed their small treats. What a great idea! I learn so much from the people I meet! The same idea would work for birthday parties or sleep-overs. Here J.D. is showing the puppet of a girl elf with some stocking stuffers.

Elf puppet filled with goodies

Two of our puppet pets

The other thing I want to point out refers to our dog and cat puppets, like the Siamese cat and Yorkshire terrier seen here. You will notice that each of our dogs and cats is wearing a "collar" and a "tag".  This is to remind children that their pets should be licensed and wear identification tags for their protection.

Now to our questions.

I like the 4-way bargellos a lot. I understand how the pattern "grows" from the center out. I can follow your examples, but I don't know how to start a new design from the center outward. Can you give me some examples to get me started?

Certainly. I'll be glad to. And I can show you a "short-cut'" that you can use to generate new designs when you run out of inspiration. All you need is quarter-inch graph paper and something to color the squares. I'll show you that trick first. Take a piece of graph paper and mark off several frames around squares that are 6 graph squares wide and 6 graph squares high. Start with the square in the lower right-hand corner. Color it. With the same color or a second color, fill in a random pattern of graph squares in the next row outward. Repeat with a 3rd color in the next rows of graph squares. Continue as long as you like, with as many colors as you like. Repeat colors if you like. Make several of these designs on your sheet until you find one you like more than the others.

Three 6 x 6 designs on graph paper

First design rotated and repeated four times

Now take a clean sheet of graph paper and mark its center both horizontally and vertically. Repeat your desired pattern on top of the horizontal line, starting just to the left of the vertical line. Now repeat your pattern in reverse to the right of the vertical line. Turn the paper upside-down. Repeat what you just did below the horizontal line above the horizontal line now. Now you have a 4-way starting pattern.  Each colored square represents a stitch in your bargello pattern. Empty squares can be worked in white, black, beige, etc. Work the four parts of your design in the center of your canvas, then decide how you want to "grow" your finished pattern. Here is what the first of our small patterns looks like done in this way. This one is done in a single color with a white background.

Second design

Here is the second "starter square"done in the same way.  the more colors that you use, the more complex the design that you create. This one is done in two shades of two colors, plus a white background. Substitute your own choice of colors. Once you have gotten that far, you need to decide if you will continue that design all the way out to the edges or put in new directions of your own making, You may want to practice on graph paper before you start a large project.

Third design

And here is the third "starter square", expanded. Here you have strong diagonals balancing the vertical and horizontal lines. You might choose one over the other to change your design as you work outward from the center. This one also uses four colors, but the contrasts are stronger and the white background is greatly reduced. It is a good all-over design.

But remember these important rules:

1. Each square represents 4* vertical stitches, each over 4 threads.
2. No canvas is left bare; stitches share the squares of mesh.
3. There will be places where there will not be room for an entire square. In that case,work as much of the square as you can.

When you did the 6-way bargello you showed two optical illusions that you and J.D. saw. I liked them and copied them on plastic canvas, but now I don't know how to proceed. You didn't show any shading on the pieces, but it seems to me that shading is what makes the optical illusions work. Can you show those patterns with the correct shading, please?

You are correct that shading enhances optical illusions.  However, there is more than one way to shade a particular illusion, depending on where you decide the light source is.  We will be glad to show you how we would shade the two illusions.  Just be aware that there is more than one "correct" way to do them.

Annake's (left) and J.D.'s (right) illusions with shading

You can use black, white, and grays for your shading or you can use various tones and shades of a single color. If you use different colors, you may achieve an interesting design, but lose much or all of the illusion. I suggest you work the designs out on paper before you select the yarns. Think carefully also about your background and whether or not you are going to outline the sections with back-stitch or some other embroidery stitch.  Good luck.  It should be an interesting project.

You haven't mentioned latch-hook lately. Are you still doing it?

Yes, although it has been curtailed somewhat because of the increase in frequency of shows that we have done this year and the remodeling we have been doing to give me more studio space for drawing and painting.  Here is a rug that I finished at the beginning of summer. When I was doing research for the posts on creating landscapes in needlework, I came across a photograph of a Ming Dynasty scroll that had a beautiful butterfly on it. I wanted to do a rug with a similar butterfly, but in "hot" modern colors.  This is the result.

Latch Hooked Rug, "21st Century Ming Butterfly"

Have a happy holiday season for all the holidays we celebrate around the world.

*This post has been updated on December 15, 2018 to correct an error in content. Our thanks to the reader who brought this to our attention.

 This post by Annake's Garden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.