Wednesday, May 25, 2011

A Short Digression

Fear not, friends of little Leo, my stumpwork lion.  Work continues on him apace. . . a slow pace, to be sure, but apace none the less.  I am busy covering what seem like endless pieces of parchment for his outer medallion.

In the meantime, there is a discussion about using wired elements on the Stitching Fingers group.  My meager two cents' worth added to the discussion was to possibly shop your hardware store for wire elements for such things as outlines and tendrils, etc.  I promised a photo of a piece using such a material, and here it is. 

This piece was designed for our EGA chapter by national teacher Marylyn Doyle, and uses wire from the hardware store as the tendrils around the grapes.  I think they look great, and creating them was SO easy.  We just wound the wire around a nail and couched it down.  And naturally, you could create just the amount of curling you wanted. . . or none at all for that matter.

And here's a closeup of the grapes and tendrils.

4 comments:

  1. Hi dear,

    Just popped over from Stitchin Fingers - just HAD to see the piece.

    How gorgeous! I will answer the rest of your comment back there. :-) Thankyou so much for taking the effort to make this post.

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  2. Yes, the tendrils work beautifully! I wouldn't have thought of using wire from a hardware store, but in future I will..

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  3. Have you seen Memory Thread from DMC? It's beading wire (I think) covered in DMC floss. You can buy floss of the same color to couch it down with so it isn't visible.

    http://www.dmc-usa.com/majic/pageServer/1l010002yr/en_US/Memory-Thread-for-Needlework.html

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  4. Jane,

    First, I LOVE your blog and am so tickeled you visited mine!

    And sorry for not responding sooner. . . just FINALLY managed a work around a blogger issue that kept me from responding.

    As to the DMC memory thread, I haven't gotten around to seeing / working with it in person. . .although I've read about and seen photos of it being used. I'm especially interested to see how it compares to the silk covered purl (apart from the obvious coiled vs. non coiled feature). Interesting how these two wired threads hit the market at more or less the same time, isn't it?

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