The First Rose of Summer ... and a Change of Direction

Did you ever make something with the rose diagram you showed us on the post in early 2017? If so, I  would really like to see a picture of it. I loved the design. It looked like such a romantic rose.  

Downloadable rose pattern

Oh my goodness, you have been waiting for that rose for a long time! I would really be embarrassed if I hadn't done anything with it!  Actually, I stitched it within a few weeks of the posting of the blog you referred to. So no one has to look up the original blog, Here is a downloadable pattern of the rose and its bud that you may use any way you choose.

Originally I planned to do just the full-blown rose. Although I liked it, it seemed incomplete. I arranged the leaves and added the partially open bud. I was happy with the experiment, so I traced my sketch onto needlepoint canvas. I did the rose, bud, and leaves in French longstitch — basically a directional satin stitch — with some back-stitching around the edges. I used a  background in a patterned of two-toned Parisian stitch (samples below) in yellow tones. It could just as easily have been done in tent stitch or a combination of patterned stitches When the piece was completed, J.D. scanned it for future reference. Then he matted it with a mat that matched the deepest tones in the rose and framed it under glass in a gold frame. But I sold it so quickly that he did not get to photograph it. (I'm still hearing about that!) So I can't show you the framed result, but I can show you J.D.'s scan.

The rose in longstitch

You weren't the only one to find the rose romantic. I sold it to a couple of newlyweds who were decorating their first home.

I'm going to give directions for doing a needlework pattern with the design, but I sincerely hope you will choose your own color scheme. The colored scan can give you an indication of where light and dark areas were intended to go in the design. Begin by centering the design on your canvas and tracing it with a permanent marker. Scrub off any excess ink with a tissue or paper towel. Now select the colors of your yarn or floss. The more choices you make, the more completely the rose will belong to you The pattern will work easily for most colors. A white rose is a bit of a challenge, but can be done with off-whites, cream, ivory, ecru, etc. I've never tried a black rose, but it should be possible with a range of grays, blues, or purples. You will need a range of  several shades of your main color, plus at least two greens. An opening bud is often more vivid than the full-grown rose. Lay your  materials out in front of you in light-to-dark order. Tag them with  numbers if you like. Add needles, scissors and any other items you think you will need. (I'll admit I'm greedy when it comes to needles; I used a separate needle for each shade.) The pattern is a “forgiving” one. If you place an occasional stitch in the wrong section, it should not spoil your rose. Small differences are to be expected in handmade items. If you run out of a color, continue with the closest match you can find.

Detail of the longstitch rose

Here is an enlarged part of the scan, showing some of the stitching and some of the background. I did it as a picture, but you may use it any of the ways suggested below or one I haven't even thought about. You can make all those decisions for yourself.  Here are just a few ideas for its use, many of which have nothing to do with needle arts:

• a painting
• a standing or hanging wire sculpture
• a collage
• a felt applique with cut-out pieces glued or sewn to a background
• a wood carving
• a trapunto pillow
• an embossed piece of copper foil
• tooled leather
• the center panel for a quilt
• a decorated lampshade

Rose pattern modified for graph paper chart

I do, however, want to show you how to modify this outline so that it works more easily as a chart. The first thing to do is to transfer the pattern to quarter-inch graph paper. I use either dressmaker’s carbon or a sheet of paper which I have colored heavily with a graphite pencil. Aligning one major straight line in the design with a line on the graph paper, i transfer the design by going over the outline with a ball-point pen that has used up all its ink. Once the transfer is complete, I draw straight lines, square corners, and forward and backward diagonal lines to come as close as possible to the curved lines in the original design. The resulting new design can then be enlarged or reduced to fit any size of graph paper. (It can also be simplified if you wish.) Before I use or store the pattern, I trace it once again with a permanent marker.

Some uses for this type of pattern include:

• a counted cross-stitch design
• a panel of ceramic tiles
• Spanish blackwork
• Russian redwork
• Scandinavian whitework
• a mosaic

Now my rose is your rose.  Have fun with it.  May all your roses be beautiful.

A Change of Direction

When we started this blog I had just retired from teaching and suddenly had a lot of time to devote to activities like needlework and gardening, so those were most of the topics that J.D. and I discussed as posts for this blog. As time went on, we got questions about a lot of subjects we had brought up in articles. We answered those questions individually as best we could.
 

Sometimes I would make a note of a question that I thought might interest a number of people, so we began to do periodic Question and Answer posts. We will continue to do these. As we became more active in Farmers' Markets, art exhibits, craft shows, etc., I devoted the occasional post to a subject that was not directly connected to our usual topics.  These were also well-received.

I want to interject here the fact that I really dislike the distinction that is made between "art" and "crafts". I feel very strongly that any weaver, quilter, woodcarver, glass-blower, jeweler, or other artisan — a word I do approve of — makes something original, beautiful, and perhaps even useful, that person is just as much an "artist" as someone who paints three stripes on a canvas and hangs it in a gallery!  Therefore, I encourage everyone to express themselves in whatever medium appeals to them. I want our readers to try a variety of activities, to pursue the ones they like, and to never, ever, let the criticism — however well-meaning — of others deter them from expressing themselves.

Last year we began series of posts showing how accepted visual art genres, like still life and landscape, could also be expressed in the needle arts. I included some historical and geographical information and tried to show how attitudes toward each genre changed over time and how new materials and techniques were applied  We illustrated each article with photographs, diagrams, reproductions of paintings and color sketches. These articles proved to be  popular and have continued this year.

Still life photo by J.D.

In the course of researching and writing those articles, we always had background material that we left out for reasons of space, or because it was not immediately needed for the points we were making. But now we want to use that material to look at some basics that apply to many creative fields. For example, the use of color — a topic rarely discussed in books about needle arts — from the physical science behind it to the psychology of it.
 
J.D.:    Often, necessity has led us off in new and unexpected directions. For instance, Annake needed photographs illustrating specific points she was making in the series of posts about Still Life in the Needle Arts; so I composed and shot a lot of them, something I had never really considered before. That process was so fascinating that I want to pursue it further. And there was Annake’s need for more working space and better organization for years of collected files and patterns — which led us to making digital art prints. Plus, the necessity of improving my digital editing capability to make some of those pieces printable has led me in all sorts of wild and wonderful new directions.

We do not intend to stop posting about the topics that filled this blog in earlier years, but we really feel the need to follow these new paths too, wherever they may lead. We hope you will join us; and we always love to hear from readers about the things we have covered (or failed to cover!) in this blog, and any creations our posts have helped to inspire. Tell us what you think about this change of direction, and what you would like to see. You can reach us through email at:

 annakes_garden@yahoo.com  or  annakesgnome@gmail.com .

Good Journeying,

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

Sunrises, Sunsets, and Rainbows: Skyscapes, Part 2

Watercolor and pencil sketch of  a sunrise by Annake

Sunrises are rewards for those of us who rise in the dark, eager to see what the day will bring. Because you have only about 20 minutes, start to finish, to capture a sunrise or sunset, it is probably best to work from a series of photographs taken at short intervals.  If you are sketching, I find it best to get the shaded areas done with their proper weights (values) and to write the names of specific colors or color combinations in the appropriate areas, to be filled in later. If you are going to try to capture the colors, believe it or not, a large box of children's' crayons may be your best tools. You can outline the major areas with pencil and scribble in enough color to match and blend together when you work on an advanced version of your sketch.

Sunrise at the Shore, photo by J.J.

Here is a simple sunrise scene that could have been taken almost anywhere. You may want to time yourself to see how quickly you can sketch it in crayon, pencil, or pastels.

Stormy sunrise photo by J.J.

Often our sunrises are paler and less intense than our sunsets, but once in a while we get a vivid, blood-red sunrise that brings to mind the old rhyme: "Red sky at morning, sailors take warning; red sky at night, sailors' delight." Sunrises often defy the ‘rule’ that clouds are always darker on the bottom. Because the source of light is below the horizon and is growing more intense by the moment, clouds are sometimes brighter at the bottom than they are at the top.

Sunrise on the Lake

Even after the sun has cleared the horizon, you have a short period of time to capture and record its effect on both the lower and the upper sky. Do NOT look directly at the sun at any time while you are doing this.  Choose your center of interest beforehand so that you can get the emphasis you want in your photograph or quick sketch. Give your center of interest the detail and prominence it deserves. This photograph shows a scene soon after the sunrise has faded.

Sunrise with deer, from Annake's sketchbook

One morning I was describing a sunrise in my journal as the colors changed. Suddenly I realized that I was not alone. A doe, last-year's fawn, was standing at the curb, staring intently at the same patch of sky that I was watching. The colors had faded to a pale saffron and a range of blues  Abruptly a thin arc of brilliant white appeared above the mesa. Within a few minutes it would be a great glowing disk, too bright to look at. Satisfied that our world was working properly, the doe and I turned away — she to munch on our infant lawn and I to write my impressions, make a simple sketch — and put her in it.

Rainbow

If you didn't know what causes a rainbow, you might easily feel that it was something magical and make up a story to explain it. People around the world made up myths and legends to explain rainbows. The most common one was that the rainbow is a bridge between Heaven and Earth, used by gods, their messengers, the ancestors of of the world's peoples, and/or for kings, pharaohs, heroes who died in battle, or people who ad lived exemplary lives to get to Heaven. Another idea was that the rainbow was actually a bow, usually in the hand of the god of thunder, to shoot arrows of lightning at the Earth.


A rainbow occurs when a thin layer of water droplets appears opposite the sun. This is usually just after a rainstorm passes by. Sunlight is made up of many wavelengths of colored light. As the rays of light are absorbed by the water drops, which are denser than the air, the light slows down and is bent at an angle. When the light leaves the water droplet, re-entering the air, it is bent again and speeds up. The bending of the light causes it to separate into its color components. When this happens in a collection of droplets, the result is a rainbow.

Double rainbow photo by J.J.

A rainbow is actually a complete circle, not just an arc. The entire circle can sometimes be seen and photographed from an airplane flying at fairly low altitudes. From the ground we only see an arc. So, sorry, there is no "end of the rainbow" — with or without a pot of gold. In order to see the rainbow, you need to have the sun behind you and no clouds nearby on the other side of the rainbow. The longest wavelengths of light are red; the shortest, violet. The red rays are bent the most and appear at the top and sides of the first layer of the rainbow. The violet rays are bent the least and appear at the bottom of the inside of the rainbow's arch. In between the two are the wavelengths of orange, yellow, green and blue. Occasionally there is a double rainbow. The second one is much fainter than the first and the colors are seen in the reverse order (violet on top, red on the bottom).

From Annake's sketchbook

When you want to capture a rainbow on paper, you will have to be even quicker than when sketching sunrises. I recommend this order: first, place the curve of the rainbow and its position on your sketch; then rough in the rainbow’s colors. Next, suggest the color of the sky surrounding the rainbow. Leave any foreground objects for last — they will be there long after the rainbow has faded and the sky clears. Remember that this is a sketch, meant to aid your memory, not a finished work — try to catch the elements of what made the scene memorable in the first place.

Sunset photo by J.J.

Sunset colors are often so brilliant that they seem unreal. Tropical sunsets can be especially vivid, You may want to lighten such colors in your composition and show the effect of the colors on objects in the foreground in order to make them seem more realistic. On the other hand, if you prefer the very brilliant colors anything in the foreground should be limited to strong silhouetted forms with very little color detail. Of course there are gradations between the two techniques, depending on the angle between the foreground and the sunset sky.

Winter sunset photo by J.J.

If you are taking photographs, I suggest you turn around and and  capture the sky in the east, directly opposite the sunset. You may find it better suits your purpose. The objects in the foreground are well-lit and not silhouetted. You can replicate the sunset sky in pastel colors and still show colors reflected on objects on the ground. This photograph shows the effect of light from a winter sunset on the ground in front of it. The sun is very low in the sky.



If you have the time to do so, take photographs or make quick sketches of the sunset scene on three or four consecutive days. Skies are seldom the same. Be sure you are positioned in the same spot each time. You should see quite a few differences, depending on the atmospheric conditions, which affect the quality of the light, and the time of year, which dictates the angle at which sunlight strikes the earth. Compare the scenes. Chose the ones you prefer and file or discard the others. Make at least one finished composition based on your choices. Combine elements from the different scenes if you like.

Panoramic sunset photo by J.J.

After the sunset you have a period of 20 to 30 minutes — depending on the terrain, weather, and time of year — to capture the lingering colors and their effects on the objects silhouetted. It is probably best if you don't begin until the sun has completely dropped below the horizon. Work with the reflection of the sun's colors on the clouds in the sky and what happens as they change. After-sunset skies are usually much more vivid than before-sunrise skies, particularly if there are thin clouds in the scene. Dust particles and smoke also produce rich reds and oranges. Notice the foreground as it darkens and gives you back-lit silhouettes. And don't forget to look over your shoulder to see what is happening in the east.

Watercolor sunset by Annake

Even if you don't photograph, draw, paint or embroider these beautiful aspects of Earth's technicolor light, please do pause to enjoy them.

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