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Parterre Progress
Interior design involves balancing places for the eye to rest with things for it to look at, but having that happen at different scales and different distances from the eye means that you can have just as much visual excitement as you want.
Once I put my “hero” stitches – the pinwheels – in the octagonal borders, I needed to find something to surround them. It needed to be much quieter, to allow the heroes to be truly heroic, but at the same time, I wanted something that would be visually interesting if you bothered to look.
This is the first two stages of Palace Stitch, which was one of the stitches I interviewed for the limestone pavement. Heathering the yarns means that even close up you have something to look at, and it helps me eke out my stash of Paternayan, too. It’s too beautiful not to use, but doing a large project is becoming something of an exercise in invention!
The final stage of Palace Stitch involves small squares of diagonal stitches. Again I have heathered yarns, this time using lighter, yellowy greens.
The placement of all my colouring variations isn’t quite exact, but I like it that way. Plants don’t grow identically, and a lot of the charm of knot gardens and parterres lies in the crisp shapes with the subtly varying colours of the plants filling them. I’ve been trying to paint hillsides and forests of late, and I never thought I’d say this, but the canvaswork is easier!
I think this is a success. The slightly lighter centre, the darker edges, and the varying colours of the pinwheels (four different shades of Appletons Crewel Wool held together) all create a varying effect which is properly geometrical and definitely canvaswork while still managing to be vaguely horticultural.
I do like it when a Plan comes together!
Golden Accessories – Pansy
The Pansy continued apace, with only one alarming period when I thought the small amount on the card was all I had left to finish the dark green.
Then I found an entire full reel, gleaming at me from the bottom of the project box.
I was greatly relieved, to say the least!
Next, however, on to the gold and silver.
Some of this echoes the other two, and was fairly easy to put in place – reverse chain stitch in the narrow sections. I learnt from last time, however, and this time I put the silver strapwork panels in before the gold, which was again Ceylon Stitch.
The silver was reverse chain stitch with buttonhole edging – so it’s the stitch I used for the titles on the Map of Amarna and the View of the Excavation. Nicely familiar, and very satisfying – but also very much easier without the Ceylon Stitch in place. Next time I will try to think through the order of my stitching!
However….
It turns out that when I fished out a piece of linen to do the last of these pieces, I didn’t check it very well. The stitches are markedly bigger, and more spread out.
Next time, Rachel, take the time to count the threads!
Parterre – where had I got to again?
There was a lot of path to stitch, but that gave me plenty of thinking and experimenting time. I started playing with the Milanese Pinwheels when I wanted a break from the endless limestone pavement, and began by using them in the interlocking form shown in the book.
But I didn’t like the look of it, too congested, too solid in the wrong sort of way.
So then I tried a square.
It looked better with somue actual pinwheels, rather than the skeleton pinwheels I used to determine the placement, but again, I thought this was too congested, pulling away from the border a bit too anxiously.
Nope.
So I asked for comments, and my cousin said, have you tried the diagonal placement without the central one – four pinwheels, rather than five, more space for them to breathe.
I think this is going to work, in fact. There’s plenty of space for the heroic pinwheels to make themselves felt, and if I can find a stitch pattern for the background that runs all the way across, I think they will be nicely set off by it.
It’s good to have progress to report!
Starting the Pansy (Golden Accessories)
To begin with, the Pansy design of the Golden Accessories went much better than I feared.
In some lights the colours of the pansy are much closter than in others, making progress quite slow until I worked out which combination of lighting to use. But the petal shapes are simple enough, and although the weave is fine enough that I keep mistrusting my counting, I am also reminding myself that it doesn’t actually matter too much if the patterning on the petals aren’t exactly as charted. I shan’t be showing people the chart when I show them the pieces, and besides, if they go in the parlour dome, it’s fair to assume any onlookers will be too dazzled to pick up any oddities!
I’ve also learnt from last time.
Last time, I tried to outline the strapwork sections with tacking stitches, so that I could stitch without counting. That didn’t work – I actually misplaced the tacking stitches and had to count anyway. Grrr.
So, this time, I counted out from one point, and then followed the chart to outline, in one row of tent stitch, all the internal edges of the strapwork, and then went back to fill in the gap.
Well, that worked pretty well so it seemed reasonable to assume I could do something similar for the outside.
Which I could – except, do you see the card with the silk wrapped around it?
When I got to the point I pictured, I had got down to just that bit left, and was contemplating switching to half cross stitch, which has neither coverage nor any real cohesion, in a forlorn attempt not to run out.
Then I looked in the project box and discovered I have an entire reel as yet unstarted!
Phew.
Octagonal Borders Taking Some Time To Resolve!
I felt that the Octagonal borders needed to be less subdivided than the long borders, which in turn meant finding a large stitch pattern. After some to-ing and fro-ing, I decided that I like this one – Milanese Pinwheel (again from Jo Ippolito Christensen).
I’m not so keen on the fact that it doesn’t really tesselate neatly – there’s a peculiar shape left in the middle if you interlock the stitched in the obvious way, and it just didn’t look pleasing. So it was obvious to me that I had best space them out to create islands in an inner sea, as it were. Not like this, however – this was to be a set of five closely interlocked, leaving any partial pinwheels unstitched, to be replaced with some other stitch. But I think it’s already looking congested.
So, trying again.
This time, four, spaced out to form a square. I’m really not convinced by this, either. The slanting sides of the octagons push the pinwheels too close together, so again we have a slightly congested look. Furthermore, as I observed with the borders for William Marshall, the square form can look very static, and in this case, that’s not playing nicely with the swirling movement in the pinwheels.
I think this does, however.
Upending the square onto the diagonal makes it possible to push the pinwheels further away from one another, and while it may only be a couple of threads, I think it looks less congested. That leaves room for me to put another, smaller, pattern “behind” the pinwheels, as it were.
You may notice that while I was wrestling in thought with those pinwheels, I kept on at the path.. So, now I have to do the pinwheels in the other octagon, and decide what to run into the background…
Overlay experiments
You may recall that I spent some extra time trialling other methods for creating the overlays. My original screenprint idea had long since been abandoned, partly because the past five years when I’ve been painting as well has given me much more confidence in myself, and partly because finding somewhere to make such big silk screens – as a one-off, what’s more! – was proving impossible.
When I’d looked again at the first overlays I used in the first photoshoot, it was clear that they wouldn’t survive much longer, so I thought I would try with my acrylic inks. I cut stensils and dabbed, I used brushes and painted, I played with pre-wetted fabrics and with spraying the fabric with water afterwards.
In fact, I had several wonderful messy days.
And as you can see, some of them were really striking, and wonderfully vague, and set against a plain background the washed out and tendrilly ones do create the appearance of decay and dissolution which is appropriate. The Amarna period was washed out of history in ancient times, and while Akhenaten has had the last laugh, for centuries his name and that of his Great Royal Wife were never spoken.
However, set in front of the embroidery, they confused the eye too much. The one on the left is too detailed, the middle one is seeping away before our eyes, and the one on the left has acquired spotches I never intended.
And then there was this one. I had thought that using a brown or sandy colour would aid the “there and not there” appearance.
It certainly nailed “Not there” – it didn’t really show at all!
So in the end, as I described, I went back to the inktense blocks, but with the added support of some pastel fixative. Since I’ve used the fixative, and the overlays are now stretched over frames and not subject to abrasion in storage, I hope very much that I did indeed find the best solution.
But if anyone tries to tell you that artists and designers get it right first time – don’t believe them!
More on the Golden Accessories (honeysuckle)
So, where had we got to…?
Ah, yes. Spiral trellis stitch in silk for the centre of the honeysuckle flower, and then the outermost narrow band of the strapwork in gold reverse chain stitch. Straightforward enough, you’d say.
Well, yes, but I’m out of practice with gold threads and these sort of stitches, and the whole thing involved more contortions than I thought possible. There are also , I think, a few places where I had to undo and re-do the green background, where I haven’t tidied up the back or held fast the stitches quite as well as I should have done. We’ll see how the whole thing survives…!
The next was gold thread again, and Ceylon Stitch. There’s only space for two columns of the “chain stitch” effect in each strap, so everything is quite tight and compressed.
I’m struggling quite a bit with the Japanese needle and the fragile gold thread here. I’m sure I became more at ease with it when I was doing more of the Tudor and Stuart style, so I’m going to just continue. From any reasonable viewing distance, the breaks shouldn’t be obvious, and in truth, at this point, I just want these finished and added to the heap in the parlour dome!
Finally, the strapwork is completed with plaited braid stitch in silver. And if I’ve said the gold was fragile, the silver was even more so – as in fact I commented, a decade or so. As I said, my suspicion is that this relates to atmospheric conditions while the thread was being made. It’s not helped by the fact that, even after a few inches of revision stitching, Plaited Braid Stitch has left my muscle memory and every twist and turn was hard-won.
I still like the look of it, though!
Another day of photography (second helping)
The complication of the overlays against the panels is introduced by the facts that the overlays are slightly bigger than the panels, they are transparent, and the overlays themselves are heavy. In any final display, the overlays will be screwed to the wall, but we couldn’t do that in Bernard’s studio!
When we took the original photos, the panels were put on the very edge of a table, tied using fishing line through that convenient gap between the lower panels and the higher ones to an extremely heavy tool box, and with the background hanging behind. Since I wanted to include the frame of the overlays, that wouldn’t do.
So here is what we ended up with! A section of background is laid on the floor, with the panel laid on it. Then we set up a set of tripods on either side, poles between them, and ran a length of fishing line from pole to through eyelets in the back of the frame. We get the shadow that reveals the overlay to be a separate thing, and several ways to adjust the whole thing until it works.
It did rather turn the studio into a low-budget version of that scene from the film Entrapment where the cat burgler is practicing avoiding a mesh of lasers with a mesh of strings with bells on, but that just meant a certain hilarity entered the proceedings!
It also meant the deployment of a ladder for the viewpoint to be high enough. It’s a proper ladder for the purpose, and it was sturdy enough – Bernard was happily standing on the platform at the top to take the final shots, which I wasn’t quite up for, as you see.
I do think the set up will produce the right photos for the purpose, but my goodness, photography really isn’t “Just Point And Shoot”. Bernard also tweaks the raw files to make sure that they bring out what he saw when he took the photos, which means that we have something really good to start from. Technology has improved immeasurably since Mary Chubb’s time, but even so, there are losses in quality as you add processes, and to have something decent at the end of a sequence of design, layout, and printing processes, you have to start with something really excellent.
Another day of photography (first helping)
I’ve been working hard on the manuscript of the book I’ve written around the Dreams of Amarna, and one of the things I want to do is stitch the story together with pictures of the ordinary Egyptians working on the dig. They are honoured in the stitchery (View of the Excavation and Loading The Felucca), but that didn’t seem quite enough.
So I’ve been doing lots of little watercolours of labourers, basket carriers, and fragments of the dig and the scenery, and now I’ve sorted out the overlays (there will be more about my experiments with ink and inktense later), I bundled up the whole kit and caboodle and took it across to Bernard Rose Photography to see what he could do.
We rattled through the watercolours in fine style, as apart from occasionally flattening a piece of paper (I tend to paint a bit sloshy…!) there was little adjustment needed.
Then, however, matters became more complicated… The overlays are big, and the fabric is slightly shiny, and I hadn’t worked out how to hang them. So we started with the easy bit – overlays on their own, in front of a background. You get a hint here of the reflectors spaced all around, and just the general sense of engineering involved. There are two pairs of tripods with poles between them, one with the background, the other supporting the overlay, suspended on fishing line through eyelets. Then there are the tripods with the diffusers on, and out of shot, there’s the tripod with Bernard’s camera in place.
Design placement for the overlays
So, we left the overlays mounted, but determining placement wasn’t entirely straightforward.
I didn’t want the images of Akhenaten and Nefertiti over the whole panel, just over the sandy part of it..
So once I was happy with the mounted gauzes, the glue was dry, and the glue pot firmly shut, I got the panels out, laid them on the floor and found some little pots to hold them up at the corners.
You can see from this photo that the gauze is fine enough that it is not going to interfere with the view of the panels – except for those who want to examine very closely, and I think we are going to be able to come up with something for them!
The mounted gauzes are bigger than the panels, deliberately, so I had to take that into account as well. You can see that I’ve not got Nefertiti quite right here – I was using the old overlay to work out placement – she’s too close to the centre.
Once I’d worked out where they were to be placed, I took copious notes. I had to work on the images from the back, because of the size of my padded mat, so I not only had to make sure I had the right placement – I had a story in my head for who would be in front of each panel, and they weren’t interchangeable!