Decorating my Design SketchBook

Dear Readers,

Lovely to have you here again. Today I will show you a little step by step how I decorated my new design sketchbook .

First Brush Casualty

I have been painting and using art brushes for pretty much all of my life. Today I had a very peculiar thing happen.

Acrylic paint: Matt varnish test

Dear Readers,

A few weeks ago I used some heavy structure gel in one of my paintings to give it an impasto look. However I found that from certain angles it reflected light a lot more than the acrylic paint on its own and therefore changed the colour of the painting.

The sun set painting is the specific painting I am referencing

So this week I decided to do a test painting and then varnish it with a Matt varnish to see if I liked the results.

The middle of the painting that looks impasto is done with acrylic and structure gel, the smooth parts are just plain acrylic paint.

Before varnish face on

Before varnish side on

I used one coat of Matt Liquitex varnish to see what the effect would be.

Front on after varnish

Side on after varnish

At the end of the day I think that I prefer it before/without varnish. I think that although the Matt varnish has homogenised the painting I think that it looks more muted and has lost a lot of definition from varnishing.

I don’t think that I will be varnishing my paintings in future. 🙂

Hope that you have been having a lovely crafty weekend.

Peace and love

Ellie xoxox

Art Portfolio update

Dear Readers,

I am sorry to have neglected you for so long! I have been very absorbed in my painting and creating lately!

Today I updated my art portfolio on this blog and it was a long time coming. It had last been properly updated in 2018 Eeep!

Looking at what I have uploaded this year seems to have been particularily productive in the painting sphere so far. Other years where I painted less I definately knitted and crochet more!

I hope that you are all keeping well.

Peace and Love
Ellie
XOXO

Dalmeny Kirk Summer Market

Hi all,

I have been mentioning it here and there but I have not yet actually made a post dedicated to my up coming market!

Weekly Art Round Up

Dear all,

Not sure if I’ll continue this but I decided to post a little round up of my art from this week.

Victorian Craft Series: Monograms and Cyphers

Welcome to the first installment of my Victorian Crafting Series working with Cassell’s Compendium of Victorian Crafts.

Morag and I decided to start off with the Monograms and Cyphers because we anticipated that it would be a relatively quick one and also because it would give us something to use as a cohesive image throughout the posts.

2020 the year of Markets

Hi all,As you can tell from the title, I have decided to make 2020 my year of Markets. I really want to try selling my paintings and my yarn creations at markets.

Christmas Time Again

Hi All,

As usual, as Christmas approaches things are getting more and more hectic and I am spending more and more time avoiding things I should be doing.

My own Adventures in Reversible Cross Stitch

Hello again Dear Readers,

Let’s celebrate! I didn’t leave it too long between posts this time. Haha. Anyway today’s post follows on from my last post. My last post was about how inspired I was by an historiacal embroidery exhibition I went to and what I learned about directionality in their cross stitch. The exhibition is the Scottish Embroidered Stories. Today I am going to cover my attempts at doing reversible cross stitch.

So I have not actually done my final piece yet as I have a whole lot of other projects I need to finish first. But I decided to make a little practice sampler to practice the different techniques I found in my internet searches. I decided to add my name and the date because I have a sampler which we belive to be my great grandmothers but we are not 100% sure. She probably didn’t add her name and date because it appears to be a practice sampler from when she was learning to embroider. She probably thought it would be thrown out eventually. But in today’s age where these sort of skills are not altogether common anymore I wouldn’t dream of throwing it out and I think that it is precious. I have blurred out my surname for safety’s sake but i want to note that I chose to use my maiden name because one of the interesting things about the exhibition we saw was that at that point in history and in Those locations of Scotland women kept their maiden names when they married. This makes tracing the genealogy of the samplers much easier.

Front of sampler

I have also included this as a way to show what the back of cross stitch usually looks like. They are straight likes instead of crosses and you have to look hard to make out what shapes they are.

Back of Sampler

Next I practiced some different techniques which I found online.

The first one I did, starting at the top, is called alternating cross stitch. You can find the tutorial I used here.

The next one I am not sure if it has a name other than reversible cross stitch but it is made differently to the alternating stitch. You can find the tutorial here. I did not like this stitch as I felt the method used produced stitches which look uneven.

The third one is not really a cross stitch but it is a reversible variation of a stitch often used to accompany cross stitch, that is the back stitch. This version of the back stitch is called the Holbein Stitch, it is apparently named after the painter. You can find the tutorial here.

the last stitch I tried was the Italian cross stitch. The tutorial is here. This method produces a cross which was a box around it. The effect is that you get a very dense square with almost no material showing through.

The last bit in this picture was a practice of using the 3 methods I liked. I used the italian cross stitch for the crosses I used the Holbein stitch for the back stitch part. And I used alternating cross stitch for the diamond shape in the middle.

Front of Sampler with coin for scale

Back of sampler

I then decided to practice a full motif. I chose a simple shamrock for this. My plan for the final piece is to only work in 2 colours which is closer to what the historical samplers I saw did. They relied more on patterns and less on colours. Many modern day cross stitch pieces are more like pictures done in paint by numbers.

I am really happy with how this turned out. The back is almost perfect in my opinion, the only problem is that it is slightly lumpy where I have woven in the ends but I am not really sure how to get around that.

Front of sampler with coin for scale

Back of sampler

Lastly here is a little bonus piece I tried and abandoned. The samplers I saw at the exhibition were all done on even weave fabric as Aida fabric (what I used above) was only invented in 1986. So I prepared a little rectangle of even weave fabric that I had and I even hemmed it by hand. I don’t know why but I always seem to go overboard with my projects. This was also going to be the shamrock design but I ended up abandoning it as it was really straining my eyes to see and count the threads. Half of me felt like I was giving up and that I should push my self harder. But thankfully the rational side of me said that if I ruin my eyes doing tiny stitches on tiny weave fabric I won’t even be able to do normal sized cross stitch on aida fabric.

Front of work with coin for scale

Back of work

And there you have it, that is the end of my experiments with reversible cross stitch. I will definitely be trying this again with the final piece that I have planned but as I said before I don’t know when that will be.

I hope that you enjoyed this and found it interesting if you are trying something similar.

Have a great week and stay crafty,
Diella