Finishing up the Kids and Butterfly

I did finish the couching and am posting from afar…I am still watching nature go by, but I spoke too soon about our wonderful temperatures. Summer is here with a vengeance; hot temperatures and humidity. Even this doe doesn’t want to move much.  I hope after this week I will be able to finish up some of those half-done projects I have been creatively avoiding.  I like Anne’s term “Creative Avoidance’; if it were a disease (and it may be), I have a terminal case of it!

Couching is fun and it hides a multitude of creative stitches (if procrastination= Creative avoidance then it stands to reason we can also have creative stitching…another thing I am very good at doing)

After I finished the clouds and sky I added the antenna to the butterfly I decided a Wrapped backstitch was better than couching.

And then on the lower part of the butterfly (red outline) I made a small cording or twist on the canvas and couched it in place. I make my cording or twist on the canvas and DO NOT turn it back on itself, but rather twist until I get the twist I like, I also use a few extra ply or a larger thread since I am not turning the cording/twist back on itself. . I find this much easier that trying to turn it back on itself and getting the proper length I need.  I start couching at the ends brought up through the canvas and stitch toward the open ends of the twist. This way if I need to twist more I can. When I get to within an inch of the ending I plunge the open ends of the cording/twist threads to the back and hold in place under where my couching will continue so I can catch and secure these ends. When I am through couching I plunge couching thread and secure cording/twist even more.

When I laid the cording twist out for the initial placement I realized that I was not going to be able to coil this at the end of the tail so I did a Cross Stitch over 1 thread and then placed a tiny Jessica around this. Then I plunged the cording/twist under this stitch area.

Lest you think I was trying to cop-out of couching…all the gold is couched using 0023 Kreinik Japan #1 for the couched thread and Accentuate Gold to couch in place. I like to couch from the outside toward the stitching. I think it makes for a soother line and I can control those little opps areas that I always seem to have.

Notice that when you are couching either the red twist or gold some planning has to go into the placement of these threads. I did the upper red cording /twist before I did the lower red twist. See the picture for the order of placement for the red and gold. And the shorter kite string was couched before the longer one. I even thought of bring the gold back out under the child’s hand and letting it hang free; but decided against this for wear reasons. I did not want it to maybe accidentally get pulled and mess up other couching or just begin to wear poorly and then I would not have rest of couching secured well if I cut it off.

I have decided to frame this piece after all and am not going to stitch the black bands but have it matted in a black mat with a gold bamboo frame. I can see this, just hope I can find the gold bamboo for the framing.

The Children with a kite was a former guild members canvas and threads and I hope that as Jessie is looking down from her golden cloud in heaven, she likes the way I stitched it.

I have already picked my next piece to stitch another Melissa Shirley Canvas(s) from another former guild member. More about this after I get back…

Thank you for stopping by… I hope you find time to stitch today…I am!

ttfn…sue