Picture Perfect

I have been taking photos of the project Ladybug Lake with my iPhone which has resulted in the colors not being spot on. I have a small less expensive version of a Canon and will start to use it to take the photos to get better resolution and color matching. I'll experiment with it this weekend as we are supposed to get some rain on Saturday or Sunday, can't quite remember which, and that would be a good day to play around with it. I'll repost the pictures next week with the old phone camera and the Canon so a decent comparison can be made. Once my designs are finished and framed, I will look to really get the best pictures I can. I have a friend whose daughter is a professional photographer and maybe I could get her to do some shots for me at a decent cost. I know a setup to do product photography isn't that expensive and I may even try it myself if I'm feeling particularly brave and the price is right. I know how important good photos are to show off products in the best way possible to produce sales because I have shopped on Etsy and there have been terrible pictures taken to sell items and I'm not sure why they would think anyone would purchase something that is out of focus, too dark or too light. The really good pix really knock your socks off and reinforces the product's written description in a visual way that allows it to either speak to the purchaser in a true fashion or not.

I received my Miyuki bead shipment and they are absolutely gorgeous! The colors are wonderful and so different than the other beads they make. Stunning. I already had a design going using just beads before I even knew about these, but now that I have them I know they will be perfect for the piece. I love it when a plan comes together, especially when it does so unexpectedly.


As an aside, and while discussing beads, I have to tell you I am reading a book about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton which has so far been quite interesting. They mention the jewelry purchases Burton made for Elizabeth which made me go back to my copy of "Elizabeth Taylor, My Love Affair with Jewelry" to see them in color and beautifully photographed. I love using vintage brooches in my work (which I will be working to make happen hopefully before the end of the year) and she had some truly stunning newer pieces along with wonderful vintage ones. It's nice to be in good company with someone like Elizabeth Taylor when it comes to appreciating gorgeous baubles and beads!

Uniquely Needleart

So here is the latest on Ladybug Lake. The branch itself finally has the blue border around the whole thing and I think makes the design look more cohesive. I've been doing the filament sparkle on the left side of the work as I went but I think I will just plow ahead with finishing the water completely and then go back to adding the filament to it later. Actually, that part seems to go pretty fast. Next will be backstitching the stems to the leaves and then finally, getting the beads on it. I am adding these really sweet white flower beads to the design and have to figure out what color I will use for the center bead. I may use a crystal, again the decision making dilemma seems to be rearing its ugly head. I should check my biorhythm chart's mental status to see how much longer this uncertainty phase will last.

I was thinking while I was stitching on my piece how difficult it would be to replicate this piece exactly if someone tried. I mean, just perfectly matching the way the fabric marker worked with the linen floss in coloring it would be very hard if not downright impossible. I even noticed how the stitched rows also had very slight variations in how the stitches laid and thus produced subtle color differences. Even the way the blended filament fibers laid on top of one another varied from stitch to stitch. So while photographs can easily enough be duplicated as prints, and even clever forgers can duplicate paintings by the masters, reproducing a piece of original needlework art would require a herculean effort that I'm not sure would result in a perfect match. Taking a photo of the work would not reproduce a proper image of the work at all as it could not display the actual textures and reflection of light on the fibers. So a perfect replica, I believe, is not possible of a piece of needlework and thus makes them very unique, and I think that makes them even more valuable and less plentiful than other forms of art.  There could be the possible exception of sculpture to this, as again, capturing the nuances of light and texture is difficult with them as well. However, cloth is not as heavy, does not break when dropped, and is easy to store. How great is that!

Very Interesting!

So I am still plugging away on Ladybug Lake and have finished about half of the stitching on it. Yeah! But while I work on it I am still thinking about the next project which will be the Ladybug Leaves. I think I have a design for it to work on that I am pretty happy about, but will have to flesh it out with some additional preliminary sketches. There is so much work involved with diagraming these designs that I am beginning to worry about the colors of variegated floss I have initially picked out. Never having worked with them, except to stitch a small few stitches on a cloth, I am uncertain about how the different colors will work with each other. In the meantime, I have found some ThreadWorx variegated floss that is just gorgeous but don't know how they would work with the beads. Maybe this is just me having doubts about the project period, it is hard to say right now. Maybe I am thinking too much about the two Ladybug projects being connected instead of being separate entities. Who knows. I'll continue to mull this further.

In the meantime I ran across another design I made along with the vintage brooch to use with it and now am thinking on that one as well. Oh, and the Sapphire Peacock design is also hovering in the wings with a design that needs serious revision since I decided to include faceted hematite gemstones on it. Ugh! This must be my week for being overwhelmed. I had a brilliant idea for using a fabulous fiber with Ladybug Leaves as a background but since I now don't know if that is on the right track, I may not get to use what I ordered.

A bright spot is that I ordered all 38 of the new colors of Miyuki Delica beads that hopefully will be shipped to me this week! From what I can tell these are more pastel matte versions. Very excited about that!

Decision making is never difficult for me so this just feels very odd. I think I will get my big mug of Chai tea and just work on my current project and give the others a rest for now. Letting go will more than likely produce a solution on its own without the extra fretting on my part.

Motorcycle Madness

This was taken a few years ago on an older bike we owned and we still have the  big

grins on our faces when we ride on our current bike.

It was an absolutely gorgeous weekend here in Oklahoma and my husband and I went motorcycling with a friend on Sunday. I not only love spending time with my hubby on these forays, but love being out in the sunshine and nature. It is always inspiring and never fails to give me ideas for new designs. The open road truly does call to me, since I was very young.

Growing up there were three of us kids which is always a problem when you are vying for one of only two windows in the back seat. For me, the reward would be to have it rolled down and enjoy the wind in my face. And even though it meant a battle with my brother and sister and a mess of tangled up long hair, in the end it was always worth it. I still get that feeling when we are riding in the country. You can never get that same feeling of freedom or those wonderful smells (and sometimes not so wonderful smells) when riding in a car. And at the end of the day when we return home we are always exhausted, with big grins on our faces.

It Counts

My fabric of choice for my work is 14 ct. Aida cloth. Now to those new to this material, that means there are 14 squares to the inch and each one of those squares has a tiny X stitched diagonally across it. Each square has four holes in the corners to accomplish this, and a pattern is needed to show where the X's go. You literally count squares to know where to place various areas of your pattern, so it is called counted cross stitch. I have used other fabrics to stitch on, but 14 ct. Aida is my favorite, although I'm not opposed to using a different type if the spirit and project moves me to do so in the future. Aida to me is strong and works well with both small and large designs and seems to love just about any fiber, paint, and embellishment I throw at it. I also enjoy the linear structure of it, it just seems more orderly to me, plus it comes in a variety of very nice colors too.

This was not always the case. Many, many, many years ago in my twenties, I was a crewel fan (and still am to a degree). I loved the wools, stitches and muslin it used. At one point I joined EGA (Embroidery Guild of America) and went to a local chapter meeting where a couple of ladies seated around me asked what I stitched. I told them crewel and asked about theirs. They told me cross stitch and once I tried it I would never go back to crewel. I politely poo-pooed their claim. I guess about a year later I took a cross stitch workshop at my local public library with a friend and went away intrigued about it. It took me several attempts to figure the whole thing out, but the warning the EGA ladies gave me came to pass, I was hooked. Now the difference back then between cross stitch and needlepoint, beside the obvious ones, was that needlepoint always had to have complete coverage of a design, while cross stitch allowed unstitched areas of background, but as time has passed, I noticed that there are now more designs that have complete coverage as well. The Ladybug Lake piece is a good example of this.

So while this creative endeavor can be tedious and very detailed oriented, it is always one in which I love to count on. Pun intended!

Ladybug Lake Update

Just a quick update to show you progress on the Ladybug Lake piece. I am so very pleased with the way this is turning out, the colors are great and the design works so well with them. Although I am getting antsy about always getting to the next "step" of completion, it is easy enough to realize how much I am enjoying the process and relax with just the doing it.

I recently saw an interview with Colin Hanks, the actor and Tom Hanks son, on "Off Camera with Sam Jones". What an amazing guy this is who truly is in love with his craft of acting. There were several things that I took away from this conversation, and one was that you just have to get out of your own way and just do it, win-lose-or draw. I like that idea as I feel I have been operating on the same principle lately with the construction of my own creative craft of stitched art. People like Colin inspire me with their can do attitude and dedicated spirit to their calling, especially when you have to reach beyond the shadow of a famous dad to do it, as many of us have to reach beyond what has been done before to explore new frontiers in our own artistic journeys.

Oh, and something else he really nailed in the interview, he hates math and the reason he gave was brilliant and really brought home my own reason for disliking it. It is very predictable because the sum never changes in any formula of it. 2+2=4 will never, ever change, and for many creatives, that monotony is the death toll for any interest in it. I love the broad learning curve of my art that allows for me to determine the outcome and establish different paths to it. Curiosity and the ability to learn something new from it is what stokes the imaginative fires of my art, and is why I am perpetually enthralled by it every day.

Your Signature Please

So I tossed around the idea of how I will sign my work. Always thinking of making it look polished and professional, I considered the options of stitching the signature or signing it with ink. Now I have done a lot of needlework and had them finished in different ways for friends and relatives. That being said there was little need for me to put my name on it since they already knew me and they were not my own patterns. I did try to stitch my name on a piece that I entered in our state fair (which I did win a ribbon for) and it looked, well dumb, but it was on there and I wasn't going to rip it out as I had run out of time for submitting it. Now I think I will use my handy dandy fabric markers to sign the work but, I am going to have to practice it. Aida cloth is quite bumpy so having a smooth motion to it is going to require doing it over and over to get the right feel. Fortunately, since it is on a grid, getting it straight shouldn't entail as much work. So how crazy is it to think that I am more nervous about writing my name than designing and then stitching the pattern to sell? After all, I will get one shot at it and hopefully it will look like it is supposed to on there, no ripping out and starting over on this task. Oh well, like so much of what we learn and do, practice, should make perfect.