Erica; Needle Painting; 124; Erica: Needle Painting

If you have a realize that you can paint a picture with needles and thread that's every bit as exciting and then it. And I'm limited as an oil or a water color. And sickening twice as much twice this portable. There's a tradition of painting with a needle in the 18th century they used to do marvelous little pictures in silk on a silk background. This one is a little girl sitting by her spinning wheel and her apron is all done in fine silk stitches. It's all one color because it's so changing in direction the stitches make it look as shaded they cheated a bit of course because the fine pots the difficult ones like the features and the head of painted on the silk with water colors. But the bushes behind her are all in the tiniest of French knots and the little house that she's sitting in front of is in shades of brown and black silk which is really very effective. Well here's another

little picture that I've had for quite a while it's the portrait of a United States ship. Sherman and I thought it might have been done by a sailor until one day I discovered on the back it was pasted Chinese newspaper. So Major King I had visions of the Chinese stitching up a portrait of the ships and sailing out into the harbor to sell them to the crew. Well you can get ideas from all over the place because there is so many marvelous books of photographs nowadays photographs look almost like paintings. They're so magnificent in color. This book is full of inspirations and they're something that I've had for a long time that I tore out of a French magazine. Which I think would lend itself to stitching magnificently. It's a good idea to just collect a lot of things and have a scrapbook and keep them for

when you're ready to stitch them. He has no calendar. It's a Swiss calendar with marvelous landscapes on it. Can't you imagine those trees. The little leaves and tiny stitches all the buttercup cups in this field. I've been working on a portrait of our cat. Yes and it never seems to come just right. I think it would be easier to take a photograph of the cat and then draw it from there. But simplify it so that it's really ready for stitches. Of course the most satisfactory and really exciting thing to do would be one of the Impressionist paintings and this one by Van Gogh off of the springtime orchard seemed to me to be really just waiting to be translated into stitches. So I worked it like this. Making my own free translation because I didn't

want to put the homo orchard in I just put the main trees and I worked on a background of real denim a rather good strong blue and then chose my stitches in bold wools because all those brush strokes seem to represent stitches anyway and it was so easy just to add texture to the painting. Well if you want to set about doing that yourself the first thing that's terribly important is to collect a motherless heap of jewels of all glorious colors. You see I've got them in rather a muddle in here but it's awfully important to save all your wools and just have as many colors as you can because you're going to need them. You never know when you begin what color you are going to need so arrange them on a hoop or on some sort of a piece of wood so that when you want them you can pull up the strands. And when the

frenzy of artistic creation comes upon you you don't have to stop to undo all those little skeins of wool that is so hard. It would be like an artist having to undo each oil painting tube as he started to work. Well the next thing you have to have. A stretch of friends because just like an artist making an oil painting you can go to the store and buy these in any shape and size that you want. At least I should say any lengths and sometimes it's quite an effort to put them together. You may have to get someone to help to all use a hammer but with a bit of struggling you can manage it quite successfully. And then when you've got the whole thing put together you get a heavy duty stapler and develop your muscle also by pulling it very tightly all around and stapling it to the

stretcher frame. Watch the threads of your material so that you don't pull them too crooked. I started in the middle here and then I went to the middle of there and all round like that gradually putting them in quite far apart at first and then finally close together. You could do this with thumb tacks if you like but it's somehow more satisfactory with staples because it keeps it really nice and tight. You see I chose a stretch of frame that was bigger than my whole picture I was going to be so that I could work with in the wood and that would not interfere with my stitches. Well now you've got to picture all ready to begin the next step of course is to

sketch the painting onto the cloth. And I'm using just an ordinary. Paper White pastel Marca because. You only need the merest outlines to follow. Don't try and be too literal just draw the tree quite roughly. And leave an indication. For your stitches because they all speak for themselves and sometimes you may decide you want to move something further. So you can erase this if you take another piece of cloth and just rub it out afterwards. Having got the design all ready stitched the next thing to do is to start with your sky.

You see if you look at this picture and you decide that it looks terribly confusing and really quite difficult it's very simple if you break it down into separate elements. Stand up with the background and work gradually towards the foreground overlaying each thing on top of the other. The sky comes first and you can work with great big long stitches. Just putting in the clouds where you want the sky to be lighted. It's a split stitch. Just going down and splitting a thread right into the tip of the last stitch. You'll find that with King on the stretch of frame you can rest against a chair on a table and still use both hands one above and one below. Because that's the quickest and easiest way to sew. Don't worry that the stitches look awfully

long because it's going to be a picture not a cushion and it won't get caught while your. Work is being used. If it was to be something that was to be sat on of course you couldn't have such long stitches because they might. Catch well. The next step after that is to put in the head along the background of the picture. And I decided that that should be in the simplest of stitches. Satin stitch on a slant over and over. Up one side down the other and that's really in the background so you should get that in because you can put all the little trees in the orchard on the top off too it's just as though you were painting it in oil. Well when you have that. All done. You will

notice that there's a long band of trees in the background. They're all blue and shadowy because it's rather misty in the spring orchard and they look like little straight stitches. You could do them just by coming up one side and going down at the other. But it's much nicer to give it a texture and to give it a definite stitch because that makes it more into a needle painting than just a copy of an aisle painting. So I'm doing a stitch which is called Single Fishbone come up on the left I'm sorry up on the right down on the left. Hold the loop. Come up in the middle of the loop. And pull it tight. I'm going to make the stalk. Of the tree as a matter of fact when it's done as a single stitch like this. Fishbone is

often called Fly stitch. I suppose because it looks rather like a fly. Overlapped the stitches don't be afraid to tuck them on top of each other. And when you've done all those branches go to your tree trunks and noticed that instead of just making the tree trunks in plain gray van Gough used all kinds of brilliant reds and purples magenta and pinks. And you could almost pen them in on top of each other. Have lots of needles threaded and bring them up as you need them. If you think that the tree trunk looks too flat you can put a few bright red stitches afterwards on the top. Get your main plane colored in first and wick it up until you get all your branches down and right on top of the sky.

Well here we are just ready to do the best part of all. And that's the apple blossom itself. I did that with white tango Laura. Because it looked so right. Do it with raised seating stitch that simply called appy down stitch by my daughter. Because you come up and you go down leaving a little bump on the fabric so that it looks raised. And notice the direction of the stitch is rather important because Van Gogh painted each apple blossom so that they really looked as though they were springing out in the spring. It gives a wonderful vibrant quality to the whole picture. So when you've done that you can then come to the ground.

And putting in. The main pot. Of the flowers on the orchard flow. With a stitch which is called Plate stitch. You come off. Of one side you go down to overlap in the middle and you come up at the other end. And overlap it again. In other words just make straight stitches but overlap them and two at a time along a band because that makes a good basic ground work. Each stitch about a needles with the pot. Then you can paint over the top of that with all your other colors with perfectly straight up and down stitches. Because that's the way that painted it. So you see it doesn't take long and it's wonderful because you can take it anywhere with you. You can do it in the

coffee in bed. You can in the boss if you like.