Earlier this week, I had the good fortune to take a class with Rosalie Peters. Even though painting on canvas isn't my thing and I was dreading covering the large space with tent or gobelin stitches, I couldn't resist the cost which was a mere $20 for supplies. Due to an unexpected windfall, my EGA chapter picked up her fee, travel expenses, etc.
My canvas confirmed that I don't have an artist eye or even a regular, sharp eye that can see details and shading as I tried to reproduce the look of the spray of flowers. Despite this shortcoming, I learned something -- instead of using several different paint colors that go from dark to light, start painting with a color that approximates the darkest shade. Then add drops of white, ecru, or light yellow to the tiny cup to create the other shades needed to paint each flower.
BUT even better was seeing some of her finished work. She used very few 'traditional' stitches to fill the shapes. Instead, she pretended she was stitching on cloth and used long/short, satin, fern, fly, button hole, and other embroidery stitches in many places. Quite a few of us were intrigued by the stitches she used for the backgrounds. One was Alicia's Lace and the other was what she said was a trellis stitch. I fell in the love with this stitch because it creates a nicely textured and patterned background and does it quickly!!!! Unfortunately, none of my needlepoint books have a diagram for the variation I want to try. The closest I've found online is step 2's blue lines on
In other words, the background is covered with diamonds and a lot of open space. Ordinarily, I don't worry too much about carrying threads from one place to another. I can't do it with this design because the threads might show through.
Cutting to the chase, can someone point me to an online site or a book that diagrams this stitch? Being quite dense when it comes to following a pattern, I need a picture accompanied by text that says insert needle at 1, come up three threads over at 2, etc.