Sunday, November 30, 2008

The Reveal--The 14th Century Medieval Cat


Isn't she lovely? I adore her face and cat eyes and the gorgeous velvet beaded jacket she wears. The wonderful gold and silver medieval-inspired shapes of her gown are my second favorite things from this design. She was great fun to stitch and took only a bit over two weeks to do. I've discovered that Kandy's chosen interesting stitches for each animal and am looking forward to the next piece.

I think Kandace Merric's Household Pet Guardian Angels are going to be beautiful! There are other angels stitching pets for the ANG Auction set (you know who you are) and I'm about to start my next angel after I get a few things done on my gorgeous Squiggee piece.

You'll notice that I'm not doing any finishing right now with the Medieval Cat. I am going to test a finishing method for ease of assembly before I turn our French kitty into an ornament. After all, I promised easy finishing for all those who are stitching on this set with me.

Jane/Chilly Hollow
Main blog at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow

The Cover Up


I'm sure you are squinting at this picture, wondering if I OD'd on turkey Thanksgiving and started taking pictures of caterpillars or something. Nope, this is the Medieval Cat with her turkeywork. You just can't see her because I've covered the canvas with sheets of heavy paper.

Once my turkeywork is stitched, I then finish all the other parts of a canvas before cutting the turkeywork loops. If you look carefully at my previous blog entry's photo, you will see the loops at the collar have been cut and trimmed while the turkeywork along the bottom and front edge of the jacket still has uncut loops. You don't have to cut the loops, sometimes you'll want that loopy look, but for the Medieval Cat, she really needs dense short fur. So the loops must be cut and then trimmed down.

The first step toward achieving that look is to cut each loop. It's not easy to find them all as the turkeywork is thick, but brush the area with your fingers after each cut or two and you will find more loops to cut. I use the sharpest scissors I have for turkeywork, although at this stage, it isn't totally necessary. You will just cut the loops in the middle right now. You end up with what you see above, spiky bits that stick out at various lengths.

At this stage you need to cover the entire canvas before you start playing barber. Otherwise you will have little bits of the turkeywork thread all over the canvas, stuck to the other stitches, the beads, etc. By the way, I did my turkeywork in stages. I covered and cut the ruff before the jacket's edge and bottom had their turkeywork done. This helped me take good photos for you. But really you should do both areas at the same time, not in stages. I ended up with more bits of wool on my canvas because of how I worked.

I covered my canvas with heavy construction paper and taped the edges to each other so they wouldn't move around and uncover a section of my canvas. With just the turkeywork visible, take your sharpest scissors and start to trim the lengths to make them the same length. Turn the canvas so you can look at it from all angles, brush the turkeywork with your fingers to uncover lengths that were hidden, clean up the fuzz occasionally, and go slowly and carefully. Like cutting hair, you should just do a little at a time. The turkeywork will slowly turn into fur!

Use a real comb to carefully tease out strands that might still be an uncut loop or just stuck under their neighbors and longer than you want. Snip a bit at a time, step back and look at the area from all sides, then snip a bit more. Clean up the fuzzies as you work.

How dense a fur you get depends on how many strands of thread you used. Wool makes the most fur-like turkeywork but I love the sheen of wool/silk blends. However, I've made overdyed cotton floss turkeywork, I've added metallic threads to turkeywork, I've even put spots in my turkeywork to mimic ermine. This is an area where you can really do a lot of special things once you master the basics of the turkeywork stitch and become comfortable with giving your needlework a haircut. The most important things to remember are: 1) the more stands of thread you use, the denser and more fur-like the turkeywork will be; 2) you need the sharpest scissors you own to give a good haircut; and 3) this is not a race--go slowly and carefully and take a lot of time.

Once you think you are done, remove the paper and find all the fuzzies that managed to sneak under the paper. I used my pink hair tape to carefully remove some fuzz. Comb the fur with your fingers or a real comb, replace the paper and trim again. Almost certainly you'll need to do a bit more cautious trimming to make everything smooth.

You will notice in the photo of the finished Medieval Cat when I post it next that the collar fur is shorter than the jacket's front and bottom edges. I wanted the cat's face to stand out a bit so the turkeywork stitches were not placed as densely around her neck. If you aren't careful, turkeywork can overwhelm the other areas of your canvas.

Jane/Chilly Hollow
Main blog at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow

I Can't Let It Be


After I looked at the last photo of the Medieval Cat with her wings being beaded, I realized I needed to talk about the squashed turkeywork on the ruff around her neck. This piece was scanned, so the turkeywork loops were mashed flat by the scanner when I put the piece upside down on it to take the image. That makes it look rather odd.

This new photo has the second area of fur turkeyworked and the wings finished. Again, the turkeywork is mashed down. Think of this piece with the loops not mashed flat by glass and you'll know better what turkeywork looks like before the loops are cut.

As I've said before, there are many ways to do turkeywork. There are punch needle gadgets you can use (M's Canvashouse sells them -- see link below) but although they make for fast and dense turkeywork, you have to glue the back. I never liked that since I have trouble turning the canvas over for the glue without disturbing the loops which it is very easy to pull out. I think denser loops which wouldn't pull out easily would solve this problem but it is just as easy for me to sew each loop individually.


I think traditional turkeywork leaves a line of stitches at the top of the section you stitched this way which I find hard to hide. Cutting my loops a bit longer probably would take care of this, but I found a turkeywork variation I liked and have stuck to that. The moral of the story is to experiment a bit to find the technique you like for turkeywork.


Next time I'll talk about how I trim the stitch. Stay tuned!
Jane/Chilly Hollow

Main blog at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow

After a Break for Thanksgiving,


I'm back talking about the Medieval Cat in the Pet Guardian Angel series that I'm doing for the ANG Auction. The photo above shows the cat's wings underway. I've been charmed by Judy Harper's talk of skip tent stitching an area, then filling in the non stitched parts. Judy always puts her tent stitches on the raised thread intersection so that the bead sinks a bit and is held on the thread intersection of the canvas where it is not raised by the skip tent stitches. So I thought I'd try it for the wings. Above you see the entire wing stitched in white pearl cotton #8 from DMC in skip tent stitches. I've put white beads in the unstitched intersections which means rows of beads, which you see on the bottom left side. The bottom right of the wings is just the perle cotton stitches. See how regular the left side's beads look? At the top I started putting beads on top of the skip tent/bead rows to make it look less regular. I didn't like the rows being so even. I thought wings should be a little messy looking so they'd seem to be in motion. This photo shows all the steps, however. That way you can help figure out what you like and use this on anything you are stitching.

Again, the top of the wing has the skip tent in perle cotton, beads in the unstitched skipped areas, and random beads attached on top. The rest of the wing also has skip tent in perle cotton, but the bottom right side has no beads at all yet and the bottom left side has just the beads in the skipped areas among the skip tent stitches. Make sense?

I hope you'll try this. It is a fun thing to do.

Jane/Chilly Hollow

Main blog at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow