Adapting Needlepoint – Not so Big a Failure

The good thing about having a Mom who is an artist is that making or adapting things to make your own pieces is not a problem.

It’s also a bad thing as I learned in high school.

At the time there was a stunningly lovely magazine, Horizon, I think, which had beautiful pictures of beautiful places in color. One picture struck me as being perfect to become needlepoint. I was a floral mosaic,in turquoise, dark line green, and hot pink. There were geometric elements and I could adapt it easily to a grid.

I proceeded to chart it on graph paper, bought my Persian Wool and started stitching.

Well you know how you color in the squares on the paper, but needlepoint id done over intersections?

I didn’t think of the intersections as what was inside the squares, but I thought of the intersections as the intersections where the lines of the grid crossed.

Therein was the problem. I started stitching, great guns, going happily along.

Then I stopped and put the stitching down for a few weeks.

When I picked it up, I started stitching in a different place. If I had just continued where I had been everything would have been fine, I could have figured out how I had translated the chart to the canvas.

But I didn’t. So I picked wrong.

By the times the areas met up, the lines didn’t. So the geometric part of the pattern doesn’t line up.

I still do stuff like this, but at least now I know the tendency and try to correct for it.