I had the Napa Vally canvas in my stash. The design is based on the “bottled poetry” sign that is in the vineyards between Yountville and Oakville. People are always parking nearby to get pictures of themselves standing in front of it. While this sign doesn’t say the same thing, the canvas got the landscape right.
I think it will be lovely framed but it’s too narrow for a standard 3×5 frame. I don’t really want to put it into a bigger frame and get a custom mat, so I have to figure out how to make the canvas wider. The canvas’s top edge was the top pf the mountains and the sides ended where the checked grass ends.
To fit the frame, I had to make it both taller and wider. The first step in expanding your canvas is to make an outline, of the size you want the finished canvas to be. I do this all the time with canvases, marking out the area to be stitched based on how it will be finished. For many canvases, this is enough.
But not if you are using stitches with open intersections or dark colors. In those cases, you’ll need to color the canvas.
I knew I wanted to use a grass stitch from Stitch Landscapes for the grass, necessitating a green background there. My first step was to continue the line of the grass to the outline and color that in. The bright green color I used means that the darker green will need to be the open intersections because it’s closer to the new color. The nature of the stitch means the threads where the expansion starts won’t show. I used a Copic pen to color.
Next, I realized that the uneven tops of the mountains meant I had to continue them as well. This is a harder process because not only are they uneven, the canvas has them painted in two colors. As long as I have the main part of the canvas to look at, I won’t need two colors to color the expanded sides. Marking just the intersections with an extra-fine pen, I created additions to the ridge by continuing the mountains on both sides. If the expansion had been larger, I may have had to create new mountains.
Once again I colored the area with a Copic pen.
This is enough to enable me to stitch the canvas. But I planned to use a darning pattern for the sky. Although I have not yet decided on the stitch, one of my favorite patterns for skies has lines of open holes. The white there would be a very bad look. Once again I used a Copic pen to color the sky.
Now I can stitch the project with no worries about the colors or the canvas showing through.
About Janet M Perry
Janet Perry is the Internet's leading authority on needlepoint. She designs, teaches and writes, getting raves from her fans for her innovative techniques, extensive knowledge and generous teaching style. A leading writer of stitch guides, she blogs here and lives on an island in the northeast corner of the SF Bay with her family
Leave a Reply