Supernatural Fiber Arts Project Diary: Embrace

I thought that these were all the colors I’d needs. Ha!

This is what I ended up with:

So, you may remember Sam’s Blue Period.

What I discovered with this piece is that jagged, overlapping, loose herringbone stitches worked best. I could lay down stitches one color section at a time and go back and fill in overlapping stitches to soften the transitions between sections. There’s not a whole lot of color range so that seemed to create the best transition between colors and convey that sense of three dimensionality.

I’m finding that each piece has it’s own subtleties of what stitches and approach to layering work best.

Brothers Embrace

Here’s the screen cap I was working off of.

Manipulated in photoshop like Sam’s Blue Period to emphasize specific areas. For this one I wanted bright, warm, sun-like gold colors.

Which I promptly covered up with flat, boring, loose herringbone-ish stitches.

Yuck.

I also discovered that this was such a large “canvas” that just suggesting form made the stitched area just look like a big ole blob. Layering color on top of the base stitching it to capture the sense of dimension and scattered colors was problematic. It worked, eventually, but only after breaking and bending needles and drawing blood. :))

So, an approach that’s organized around laying down color first and not organized around creating form from the beginning didn’t work. I hope this makes sense.

So, instead, smaller x-stitches and working within a smaller subset of areas when laying down the first layer seemed to be much more effective.

This was what I ended up with and it just wasn’t quite right.

Nothing like another eye on a project. I got a beta from Meesasometimes and she noted that some strategic use of contrast would help punch up the image.

Here’s a pic of my setup for working. If you’re not watching Mark Watches Supernatural, you should be. 🙂