Yesterday I was working on “Change Is Bad.” It’s a great canvas for beginners because it’s:
- small
- stitch-painted
- on 13 mesh
A beginning needlepointer would be tempted to stitch the whole thing in one thread and all in Tent Stitch. The result, though pleasant enough, won’t have as much texture and excitement as the needlepoint will have if you just make a few simple changes.
Here’s what to do and what it does to improve your projects:
- Use different threads. Using a variety of threads is the single easiest way to get texture into your needlepoint. If you pick single-strand threads, they are, mostly, very easy to use. I used Very Velvet for the letters, giving them a solid look that’s s almost like fabric. The background uses Glisten which adds just a bit of shine and creates a great contrast to the velvet. The blocks will be stitched with Neon Rays giving a shiny non-metallic texture. The single thread row will be stitched in Kreink and Sparkle Rays both being metallic.
Without doing any different stitches I get interesting textures that highlight the words because they look more like fabric.
- Reverse direction of your stitches. If you know how to make any form of Tent Stitch, you know how to make Reverse Tent; it’s the same stitch done from lower right to upper left. Here Reverse Tent could be used for one color of checks or for one color of one-thread lines. When you do this with some threads, the light also reflects differently and so one color looks like two colors. The direction change makes you stitching have more depth because it is not all the same.
- Skip some threads. I use open stitches often in my needlepoint, but rarely are they just Tent Stitch. The white background here is a grid made of intersecting lines of Tent. The great thing about skipping threads, even if you only use Tent Stitch is that it makes the area look lower than the surrounding solidly stitched areas. It makes it so easy to put the background in the background!
Pick your canvas to be a great beginner’s canvas: larger unshaded areas on a stitch-painted canvas, preferably on larger mesh. And even if you only know one stitch, you can make needlepoint that looks modern, unboring, and , best of all, is creative to stitch!
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