Posted Monday, July 24, 2006

Julie's Summer Projects
Ever wonder how Julie spends her time on her summer hiatus? After a week or two of rest and relaxation with family and friends, developing art projects for her nieces and nephews and walking on the beach, she gets down to serious design and stitching. Click article title for details on Julie's projects for this summer.

As you know from earlier articles, Julie was wowed by all the new fibers on display at the Summer Market last month. Building on that inspiration, two of her projects this summer focus on the creative use of fiber and the interplay of fiber, color and special stitches. In this first example(above), Julie has taken one of her geometric canvases (Item 99J-B Mazes) and combined our new Terian Crafts shaded wool with Ty-Di Simply Wool and Watercolors. (Notice that she's working these colors over her standard blue and white geometric canvas. You do not need to restrict yourself to blue and white when stitching these geometrics. Many colors will work -- that's what makes them ideal candidates for home decor.) To provide interest and depth, Julie is combining the basketweave stitch with diagonal twos (slanted Gobelin) and Continental. This gives a great "3-D" look to the finished work.

Julie's second project is preparation for a class she will be teaching next year. Her goal for the class is to acquaint her students with the look and feel of different fibers as well as to introduce them to a variety of needlepoint stitches. Look at this array of fibers: Ty-Di Smiply Wool, Perle cotton, knitting cotton, embroidery floss, metallic ribbon floss, Vineyard silk and Watercolors. Julie plans to treat the squares as a sampler, varying the stitches to give her students maximum exposure to the variety of textures and looks possible in needlepoint. The shell will be done in 3-dimensional raised stitches using a combination of EPIC multi-tone wool and Perle cotton. All of Julie's Summer Seas canvases lend themselves to decorative stitches and multiple fibers. (See the Summer Seas Starfish (26P-A) and Sand Dollar (26P-B) in the Tropical Delights category, and the Summer Seas Tote Insert (33P) in the Bags category.)

Julie's third project is the design of kneelers for her church (St. Paul's Episcopal Church) in Key West). I love the richness of these golds, reds and blues. Julie has designed the basic pattern and worked out her color scheme. The canvas she provides to the church's volunteer stitchers will have a central design element painted on it and the stitchers wil then use the graph shown in the photo to stitch the base pattern around the central design.

And if there's any time left over...Julie will create new canvases for the 2007 season. She's already painted a butterfly carpetbag to coordinate with the Mimi Butterfly Tote (8P) and may tackle a paisley envelope bag before the summer's through. Some mermaids might surface too (you know Julie!).