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I love it all: embroidery, canvaswork, quilting, crochet. So much to do, so little time.





Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Lovebirds - Lessons 2 and 3

Hey Blog Buddies,

What have you been up to recently?  I've been spending a lot of time working on my blackwork lovebirds in order to keep up with the cyberclass I'm taking from Tanja Berlin.  It's a good thing the overall size of the piece is not terribly large, is all I can say.

In case you missed my first post about them, here is where I left off...

This was Lesson 1.
And here is Lesson 2.
It's kind of hard to see in this photo,
but there are a couple of small stitched areas
toward the top of each bird
that look a little lighter than the rest of the body.
That's because most of the body
was stitched with DMC 310,
but the lighter areas were stitched with
YLI silk which is noticeably thinner than DMC!
How thin was it?
It was so thin that I had to tie it on to my needle!
And here I thought that silk floss
was always thicker than DMC floss.
Gloriana is.
You learn something new every day!

I thought that Lesson 3 was rather ambitious,
but I managed to finish it.
I'm all caught up to where I'm supposed to be,
waiting for Lesson 4 to be published.
The colors in the body are
four different shades of metallic thread,
and the beaks were stitched with Au Ver a Soie silk,
which is a bit thicker than DMC 310.


Here's a close-up.
As you can see, some of the octagons
contain a two-color metallic square.
It all depended on whether
they straddled the basting lines,
which are thankfully gone now.
They annoyed me.
Put them on my long list!
This is a fun class,
and I like how the birds are turning out.
Lesson 4 (coming this Friday): the heads!

Hope you're stitching something fun.
Thanks for visiting!

7 comments:

Linda said...

Gorgeous.

Linda

EvalinaMaria said...

Looks beautiful! Tanja Berlin is also doing needle painting and that's the one I want to learn someday.

Toni said...

Thank you for dropping by my blog and leaving a comment.

I have already done googling for DMC conversions for certain overdyes (the moment I received the pattern and before I emailed the designer) and end up nothing with the threads that their pattern called for.

Anyway, not a problem anymore since I ditched that pattern and wouldn't buy from that designer/company anymore.

Thank you once again and have a great day!

Cheers!
Toni

cucki said...

looking so lovely xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Karen said...

They are turning out beautifully! I've always wanted to try one of Tanya Berlin's classes. :)

rosey175 said...

This looks like such a fun class project! I love how the little squares of color add so much detail. I've always wanted to try blackwork but I'm so hopeless at counting that I could see myself in despair more often than not ahaha.

Caitlin @ Naughts Cross Stitches said...

They look gorgeous. It's amazing the detail you can get from a repeating pattern.