This is my new needlepainting project, from Trish Burr's Redoute book :





They are actually Anenomes but because the recipient Kit wants them to be poppies, and it's easier to type, I'm going to call them Poppies.

I did the transfer of the pattern this morning and it nearly killed me.

I found out the hard way that using transfer paper doesn't work on a linen like Belfast linen - it just didn't transfer the colour because of the lumps in the material (unlike on the very fine linen I used for the Rust Red Iris). I wish I'd checked before drawing over the entire picture!

I did the transfer by tracing the pattern onto tracing paper and then dragging an automatic pencil *through* the paper to make marks on the linen beneath.
This is what the tracing paper looks like now : (side ways)

All the pieces are actually loose.

It did mark up the pattern ok. There is some detail loss but I'll add it back in as I go along.


Well, that's as clear as mud, isn't it. Photoshop inserted 'lines' into the scan of the linen because it was trying to be clever in some Photoshop sort of way, and this second attempt using Microsoft Paint shows that Paint has done a bit of the same thing.

It's Antique White linen (I forget which type - Kit bought it), with no cheques or stripes. That's graphics processing software being 'clever'.

I'll re-draw over it with a micro-pen, although I'm not re-doing the entire pattern today - I've already drawn it all 3 times.

Thread and Colours

I'm going to use my own choice of colours in this. It's pretty simple - a red flower, a blue flower and a mauve one, with the others cream and a bit of the other colours mixed in.

I'm going for more of a maroon sort of red, a purple sort of blue, and a rich dark purple flower. The flower with it's bottom facing the screen will have a deep orange, not a yellow, bottom.

I found, as always, that I didn't have the complete range of shades that I needed. You'd think that I would, with 5 boxes of DMC, but I don't. Particularly the maroons.

I was going to use some rayon on the outer edges of the flowers, out of sheer desperation to provide extra shades but Paula H. confirmed what I suspected - it'd be just a bit too shiny and stand out too much.

I'll wait until my new colour card arrives (the DMC '08 one :-) and find some more shades of maroon and purple in DMC cotton thread then.

Until then I can work on the leaves which I'm supposed to do first anyway. I'm doing them in forest greens, rather than the olive colours (so the whole project is based on blue/purple rather than yellow). That, and the outlining (in pen and in thread) of the design will take me ages.

I hope this makes sense - my fingers are aching from the transfer and I'm all sleepy.