Adaptation Twinchy Gallery

This needlepoint adaptation takes a Native American Kachina mask, one of my favorites, but also one of the simples, the Sun Kachina.

It’s really simple to do. Draw a circle of any size (I used the bottom of a glass for mine). Then split it in half horizontally. Split the top section in half vertically. Draw horizontal rectangles for eyes and a round area for the mouth (Remember these are masks, so the face is abstract.).

That’s all you need to draw. Stitch over all the outlines, the mouth, and the eyes in black. I used black Helene silk from Rainbow Gallery’s Backgrounds line.

The top two sections are always turquoise and rust. I stitched them in Diagonal Mosaic and Reverse Diagonal Mosaic using Pebbly Perle for the turquoise and Impressions for the rust.

The background is rows of Diagonal Gobelin stitched in light gold Crescent Colors Perle #5.

I love Kachina masks and think I’ll do some more (probably as part of a future Twinchy challenge).

This Twinchy is adapted from another source, a world away, but another favorite. It’s taken from a Chinese lattice pattern. Drawings of these windows, doors and screens from all over China were collected in the early 20th Century by Daniel Sheets Dye.

These designs are geometric and I’ve used them often for needlepoint of one kind or another. My book of them is over 25 years old and is well-worn.

The technique I used for the multi-colored areas is Trianglepoint. It was invented by Shirlee Lantz (author of Pageant of Patterns) in the 70’s and uses straight stitches of various lengths to build triangles. Combining these creates triangles, diamonds, and octagons. They are tons of fun to stitch.

The triangles are stitched using an overdyed Grandeur from my stash. The background uses Crescent Colors Perle #5 in a very dark brown, almost a black.

This pattern has offset columns of large triangles, which I really liked. But what surprised me was the shape of the negative spaces. In the original lattice, these are triangles too and both of them have a framework which creates the pattern.

But when stitched, that framework disappeared and instead the background became irregular shapes. I can’t decide if they are large triangles with a bite taken out or overlapping small and medium size triangles.

In any case, since they are irregular I stitched them in rows of Straight Gobelin over two threads. If I were to stitch it again, I would color the background first, so I didn’t have that annoying dandruff.

These were both tons of fun to do and didn’t take long at all.

The fun of adaptations will continue. Learn about how to adapt various techniques and types of art to needlepoint to this section of All about Needlepoint.