Landscape embroidery

 I have just realized that a post I thought I had done some time ago is still sitting unpublished on my computer. During our enforced home lockdown during the pandemic, I amused myself by embroidering 5 large floral pictures, but I thought about doing a landscape picture to hang on the wall. I looked at adult colouring books and found some possibilities and ordered the most likely books.

While waiting for the books to arrive I went out and purchased several frames (five). After the butterflies, I'm not getting caught again without appropriate size frames.

I found one or two realistic landscapes I could use and selected one with a stream in the foreground with stepping stones leading across to a gazebo surrounded by trees and fields.

I pre-shrunk some cotton material. I've learned my lesson after ruining one tapestry size project, always wash the fabric first. Then I cut out a large rectangle, laid it over the selected picture and traced the image in pencil, omitting some parts I didn't want and modifying others. 

After I had my drawing done it was time to select colours. I have over a hundred shades of different colour skeins of threads, both the old Coats and Clark Anchor threads and the DMC threads from when I did petit point. I needed to sort out what colours and what shades of colour I wanted to use for each element. I used 3 strands of thread throughout and selected stitch types that best allowed following the natural contours of the object I was working on.

Selecting colours took several days as I planned things out. When you need to blend shades of colours, you have to make sure that you have enough of the colours you want to use for the entire project, not just the segment you're working on.

I think I used 7 colours in the stream, which I then couldn't use for the sky. I had several trees and bushes each of which took at least 3 shades of green. When you have grass, overlapping flowers, overlapping bushes, overlapping trees, overlapping more trees, the colours have to have enough contrast so that you can distinguish one from the other.

I decided to do the gazebo in white, which in terms of thread colour, was white, light cream, dark cream, beige and pale brown. I started with the bottom of the roofline doing rows of couching stitch in white, then the pillars also in white using a romanian couching stitch. for the caps of the pillars did a short row of fly stitch. I used an outline stitch for the roof and segments. The fill-in for the dome was done in long and short stitch using thread shades in light and dark with the palest shades in the middle of each segment.The base of the cupola was done in chain stitch followed by several rows of couching stitch and topped with tight rows of fly stitch and a few sraight stitches for the peak. The lower part of the gazebo was done in chain stitch, with long and short stitches for the inner part of the gazebo and satin stitch and split stitch for the floor and stairs. That's 9 different stitches just in the gazebo.

I didn't stop to take in progress pictures, but while I was working on it, my sweetheart was posting some things on our website and he took pictures of what I was doing and uploaded them. Grr! I don't mind the picture taking, but I don't like displaying half done work. At least that means I can show you what I did in detail.

The stepping stones and rocks at the water's edge, parts of the daffodils and the crocus flowers were done in satin stitch. The water, sky and background grass were all done in long and short stitch, blending two to seven shades of colour for each area. Long and short stitch works really well for blending colours.  There are 7 shades of blue in the water and 6 different shades of blue in the sky. The daffodils were done in daisy stitch, satin stitch, split stitch and straight stitch. The grass in the foreground used 2 shades of green in fly stitch.

The tree trunks were stitched in 3 shades of brown using a split stitch and the leaves were sewn using a daisy stitch in either 2 or three shades of green. I thought sewing every individual leaf was time consuming, until I had to go back and fill in the spaces between the leaves with tiny straight stitches. Doing those fill in stitches took me a whole week and I'm not even sure if it wouldn't have looked better just to fill in the large areas and leave the itty bitty one tiny stitch areas blank.

The original image called for lots of background shrubs and trees and fields which don't lend themselves to stitching, so I opted to replace them with a field of grass. I chose 2 shades of a bright green that would stand out behind the shrubs, trees and flowers and filled in the area with vertical long and short stitch, which contrasts with the horizontal water and sky. Since I omitted the shrubs that were in front of the trees on the left, I had to extend the tree trunk to come down behind the gazebo so the it didn't look like the tree was floating in the air.

The low lying shrubs to the right of the gazebo were done with rows of  open daisy stitch. I kept on debating whether I should fill in the open area, but it felt like it would bring more attention to an area I wanted to fade into the background so I left them blank.

The original diagram had tulips along the water's edge, but they were so much smaller than the daffodils in the foreground, tulips didn't make sense so I changed them to crocuses. The weird little lumps that were supposed to be on the right didn't have definite shape or position so I replaced them with evergreens that I did in a vandyke stitch that lent itself to an evergreen shape.

The rest of the picture was filled in with long and short stitches in six shades of blue. Now that it's done I wish that I had worked with lighter shades of blue for the sky. 

I also wish that I had paid more attention to the size of the picture. The image is 6.5 inches across. I stitched some extra so that the stitching would go under the mat in the frame. The interior size of the mat is an opening 8 inches wide. I added about a half inch on each side  which left me with a finished size of about 7.5 inches, which was not quite enough. I can fix it by sewing a little more along the edge, except that I'm not sure which colour I used where. I started out keeping track of which colours I was using, but stopped at the last couple of shades, which just happen to be the ones along the right hand side of the picture. It will be easier to just swap out the mat for a wider one.

If you were counting, that's 12 different stitches in the whole picture. Thirteen shades of blue, twenty one shades of green. Twelve shades of brown, five shades of cream, four shades of yellow, one shade of pink and one shade of purple. 

I bought 5 frames and only one is filled. I just went on line and ordered some more colouring books. I wonder if I have enough thread or if I should order more colours just in case.