Try Out Colored Canvas with this Great Idea

Updated December 17, 2019. I’m continuing my celebration of Christmas by highlighting great ideas from others for creating wonderful needlepoint ornaments. Today’s ides comes from finisher Tamara Wilson.

Tamara finished a set of Easter eggs on colored canvas several years ago. They were stitched by Becky Hamilton. Seeing them gave me an idea for easy projects for you to make that will give you practice working on colored canvas and let you try out different ways to explode stitches.

Here’s what you need to make an ornament:

• template of shape (round or egg is best)
• Pigma micron marker to trace template
• colored mono canvas
• overdyed thread to coordinate with canvas

You may even have the thread and canvas in your stash, I know I do.

Here’s a summary of how to make the ornament, followed by an explanation of exploding stitches:

• Cut your canvas to 2″ bigger than your template all around
• Place the template under your canvas and trace it on trhe canvas with the pen
• Using your overdyed thread, stitch the ornament.
• Finish as desired.

The beauty of these ornaments comes from the interplay of the canvas colors, usually pastel, with the more intense colors of the tread. You only get this interplay if some of the canvas is exposed. Most of the ornaments pictured here use open darning patterns, but you can do something similar with stitches you already know by exploding them.

There are a couple of ways to do this:

1. Separate rows and/or columns of the stitch by two rows. Skipping one row is too subtle for the colored canvas to really show. This can be done with any stitch made in rows or columns. Box stitches that are large look great done this way. So do some cross stitches, such as Woven Cross.
2. Split the stitch and separate the two halves. This is a more complex process but you can find versions of Milanese that are split this way, below, then just more the oparts and rows fuerther apart.

If you look in books on shadow or lite stitching you may find additional ideas. For this project you will use the full amount of thread for complete coverage.