July 9, 2019 Tuesday

The First Day of My Remodeled Website

My New Year's Resolutions for 2021:

On Jan 5, 2022 I just read these and decided they will stay another year. For now I don't think I can top them.

1.  Take all the pent-up anxiety about perfection and redirect that energy toward creativity. Open up your minds and think of creative  possibilities you can bring to your needlework, ways that will personalize it and make it distinctly yours.  Here are two ways to start:

Oops you made a mistake and you face a lot of ripping.

Ask yourself, is it really a mistake or a variation?

You do have to rip if you crossed most of your crosses in one direction and suddenly you started crossing them in the other direction, yep no way around that. Why? The real reason for good technique is that it allows all your attention to focus on your design (where it should be).

You don't have to rip if you made a leaf one row bigger than the design called for. This is obsessive behavior that needs redirecting in 2021.

You do need to rip if you make something so large it is out of scale with the rest of the design; you do not have to rip if it is barely noticeable.

You do not have to rip if you mixed up colors and the design is not exactly as the designer's model. For heaven's sake, if it looks OK, stop obsessing.

You do have to rip if a color or texture is not in harmony with the rest of the design.

You do not have to throw away a design if you run out of a dye lot.

If it looks like you are headed toward thread shortage, don't use the thread to the last strand, save at least 1/4 of it. Buy some more and decide where and how to introduce the new dyelot. I actually prefer to work with multiple dyelots. If you pay attention to lights and darks etc., they can bring an added depth to your design.

2. In memory of Audrey Francini, my generation's greatest needlewoman, slow down. Needlework is not a speed contest. Audrey was the slowest stitcher I have known. She was also the best. I have a couple of great stories about Audrey and her speed, I'll tell them in the next couple of mornings.

3. Forget about the Needlepoint Police. They don't exist except in their minds. You may meet people who think they know it all. Good for them, I applaude their confidence, but I don't buy into it.

I have probably told this story a dozen times but it is worth telling again and again. Years ago a friend wrote to me and asked, will this Kreinik braid look good with this silk?

I replied, beats me, try it and see.

Friend: whadaya mean you don't know, you're the teacher.

My reply: if the Immortal Artists Of The Western World don't know without trying, how would I, one mere mortal needlework teacher? (There's a bit more to this story too, I'll tell the rest another time).

All this goes to say once again, there is no real right and wrong, there are problems of course. The best way to find solutions is to think creatively.

Those are my New Year's Stitching Resolutions for 2021.

Reminders for me as well as for all of you.

Friday, January 21, 2022

I'm running late this morning, sorry about that. I added a short blurb to Queendom Website's Home Page this morning, hopefully will have time later this afternoon to organize it and sometime soon we will start lessons.

Early next week I will introduce you to 'Miss Beauty-Challenged.

Thursday, January 20, 2022

A start of a lesson this morning: a comparison between Snowflake Girl's face (as small a profile as I have stitched) and the little Berlinwork face.

Noteworthy, when you consider a counted or a painted face:

1. How many meshes are given to the face? As the Berlinwork face has so few meshes, it is almost impossible to portray facial features.

2. Choosing the smallest possible stitch so that you can take advantage of the meshes you have.

There are some more considerations and I will write about them tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow: I have a lesson in how to deal with my ongoing computer problems. When I have finished the lesson, I will turn my attention to Time Samplers. I have all the supplies and expect it to take me a couple of weeks to put them together.

The problem I foresee is mailing them. I do have the jitters about sending them off by uspo because of the current theft of packages. It isn't that the average thief would be interested in a needlepoint kit, but so many packages get destroyed in the search for items of interest.

Is this just paranoia on my part? Am I reading too many alarmist news reports? How can I know?

My plan is to wait a while and see if it gets better. Of course, it could get worse too. What's a girl to do?

Wednesday, January 19, 2022

This morning on Queendom Website's home page: my Snowflake Girl. I poste the whole figure this morning so that you can see how small her face has to be in comparison to the size of the whole figure.

If I had given myself enough room for an elaborate face and I still wanted to stitch the whole figure, it would be huge and I would likely still be working on it today.

To keep the size under control and the proportions working well, the face has to be small and therein lies the problem.

Tomorrow I will have a few comments on choosing options and an interesting observation about allotment of stitches.

Tuesday, January 18, 2022

Remembering my FIL  on his birthday. I never cease to miss my parents-in-law, they were so welcoming to me from the minute I met them. Everyone should be as lucky as I was in having them for the years I did.

This morning, a step back a few years from Flora, Twilight Angel was from Y2K. Hard to believe Y2K was 22 years ago. A very basic simple face but surprisingly expressive.

I teeter between these very simple faces and faces with more detail. I think you can make an argument for both. The very basic face in many ways suits the medium better than the more detailed face.  

Take a look at both Flora and Twilight Angel on Queendom Website's home page and asnwer this,  which do you prefer and why?

Way back in my beginnings I had to stitch a project where every stitch was a struggle. In the end there were more compensating stitches than full units of stitches and I remember thinking, why would anyone design something like this, what's the point?

That design always looked tortured to me, as if the stitch choices distorted the design rather than flow with it.

The deisgn was basically a test to see how much compensation I could do, but beyond that was a futile exercise, and I made up my mind afterwards to abandon any technique I had to do such battles with.

To this day I believe, if you have to battle a stitch to make it work, abandon it and find another.

I think the same applies to faces. Why torture the medium? All too often the torure shows in the finished project.

I have to keep this in mind as I approach the time to work on Susan B's glasses.

Monday, January 17, 2022

I am going backwards. I began a couple of days with my most recent profile, Deco Lady. As near as I can remember, I stitched her after I did all my cameo projects; well as I can remember, I did all of them well before 2008, so they are now a good 15 years old.

2008 was the year my needlework life changed, and I can remember approximate dates of projects by whether I taught them at a seminar or not. I taught all of my cameo projects; I had stitched Deco Lady but I had retired from Travel Teaching before I wrote her instructions.

Another time marker: I stitched my Elizabeth 1 Portrait in 2008 and she marked an important change: I stopped stitching profiles and began working on 3/4's faces, so all of my profiles are before 2008, some of them substnatially older.

I will post many of them in the next few days. My big deadline is on Friday, so I won't have much time till then. After Friday I will begin thinking about lessons.

Sunday, January 16, 2022

Yesterday I posted a closeup of Deco Lady on Queendom Website's home page. Profiles were among the earliest faces I made and I have not stitched any in the last 15 years or so.

Now I wish to return to work on them. I plan to use cameos in hopes of giving you some basic guidelines about proportions. Luckily I now have Miss Beauty-Challenged to help me with comparisons.

Deco Lady was a step forward for me, for she is the first time I outlined a face. I remember doing so because I adapted her from a 1920's card of outlined simple blocks of color. I remember thinking at the time, OK, I would rather not use outlines but now years later I think it was an advantage on such a small face.

If you look carefully, each of the ragged Tent Stitches looms large (the same problem as my little Berlinwork face) and the very narrow outline around the profile helped smooth out the Tent Stitch.

As I have written before, very small faces are very difficult and now, years later, I can see that the outline helps.

So what am I doing on this, the first day of the second half of January 2022? Making tiny ornaments on 18 mesh canvas.

They take only a few hours from first stitch to finished ornament and they certainly encourage experiments. Sometimes very successful (I did one I really like yesterday) and sometimes less so, but it isn't like throwing away a month's work.  

I've learned quite a bit: one important point that I learn and relearn: willing to try, willing to step outside the box and willing to rip, these little ornaments have given me great ideas for more ambitious projects.

Saturday, January 15, 2022

Interesting alert this morning along the western coastline, the threat of a Tsunami. I will update my FACES later on this morning....

It is a couple of hours later and I am watching the new right now. Meanwhile, back to work.

On Queendom Website's home page I just posted a relatively recent profile face, Deco Lady. 'Relatively' is the operative word here because I stitched her sometime between 15 and 20 years ago. For a long time I did simple profiles, very simple.

I will introduce Deco Lady this morning and write more about her tomorrow morning.  She is, with one exception, my most complex profile.

Friday, January 14, 2022

Difficult day ahead today: I have to begin work in earnest on my website. My help session is a week off and I will need to work hard in the next week if I am to make the most of the help.

This morning on Queendom Website's home page I have posted my whole portrait of Queen Victoria and I've written how I proceeded to stitch her face.

Victoria's Face wasn't my only problem: her brunette hair and white dress caused problems, as did her jewelry. I will write about that tomorrow morning and then we will move on.

If you are someone who wonders about my excitement over my Beauty-Challenged cameo, I have begun writing about her also. I am delighted to have her, as I have said, and I will soon begin work on her, setting her up to help with lessons, but first I have to get by my help session a week from now. Wish me luck.

This one wants to hang around for a while and meet Miss Beauty Challenged.