Well, I 'discovered' something the other night. Not sure if ya'll know this or not. Maybe I'm the last to know and didn't know it. What is the it?
Well...
I hope you can see this and follow my reference points. This is Rainy Day from the SamSarah calendar and I was attempting to make the green and blue strips very stripey and make it look like rain. As you can see the blue has very little variegation and the green looks much more stripey. But, when looking at the green floss it too was a pretty solid floss color with very little color change.
At the top of the left green stripe above the rain drop you can see four columns of green that are all pretty much the same color and then the 5th column is darker and the rest of the columns to the rain drop are darker. I used two strands of floss for the first 4 columns and another 2 strands for the darker columns. But, on the second green stripe it is wildly striped. What I did was stitch column (for lack of a better way to describe it) column A, then C, E, and G - at the half way point of the strand of floss I started to go back and stitch columns F, D, and B. This tended to spread the lighter color out into more columns and then as the floss got darker I went back and filled in the missing columns I hadn't done on the first trip.
I know we've taught ourselves to stitch with variegated floss either in columns or rows one stitch at a time to get the most of the color shading available. Sometimes we echo a motif spreading the color out and we try to rid ourselves of the linear issues in variegated floss. But, this is the first time I have been able to take a lightly variegated floss and use it in a way to mimic a more heavy variegated color.
I ask - is this something different or did you all know this and I missed that day in bloggerville stitching school? It kind of made me a little excited to stitch something stripey again to see if it always works. btw - I was not stitching those columns one full stitch at a time - I was stitching the length of the column in half stitches and then doing all the second crosses back to the top.
Also, the Fourth is finished too -
This is the one where I was amazed how well the red and purple meshed. More subtle than expected.
This week has found us without electric on two separate occasions and that means no a/c, tv, or internet. Oh the horrors! The second storm through the area caused two of our trees to tumble into the power lines and cause snap, crackle, boom, fire, and then BOOM. No lights for nearly 24 hours. Thank goodness for generators! Told my sister (who is moving into the neighborhood again) to start a generator fund now - she's going to need one.
Compared to some we got off lucky. Courtney lost some siding on her rental, an old co-worker who is on vacation has a tree through the middle of his house, and a local fire station was lost due to a small tornado.
This morning found me cleaning out the fridge and I ended up making taco meat, grinding some pork roast for Wedding soup, grilling chicken, and pre-making some Salisbury steak which is now in the oven. And doing all those dishes that I didn't do due to the power outage. The laundry and lawn mowing is fini too. Busy day, hoping for some stitching time later this evening.
Hope today finds you smiling!
Denise