A Good Idea

At 3.30am this morning, I had an idea.
I just wasn’t happy with my approach to split stitching the butterfly wing, dividing it into areas to give it texture, rather than using the longest stitches possible.
(Here’s a photo of part of it as a reminder):

If I did it again, I’d use the longest stitches possible, but I’d still be stuck with split stitches between the wing pad channels, because they are so narrow and I have 3 colours to fit into each one)
Anyway, I thought – what if I outlined the edges of the split-stitched areas? To make it look like there are veins all over the wing?
Like this :

It means that I loose the blended effect where two colours meet, but I think that it looks more ‘put together’.
I used the same thin copper metallic thread that I’d used on the wing pad veins. In this case, scanning the piece meant the copper thread really lit up – it’s not quite so obvious in real life. (Please send prayers to my camera!)
There are two types of copper/gold metal thread to go on the wing yet, so hopefully that will pull it together even more.
I did these ‘veins’ in backstitch. Couching down the copper thread would have been far preferable, giving much smoother lines, but the pain in my hands wasn’t up to holding down a light, flighty thread in an exact place then stitching it down with the other through the existing split stitches.
I’ve just been on a spending spree at a fabric shop on Etsy – a selection of 18”x24” for only $3.50USD each – tho they are coming from India, so I do hope they arrive sometime this side of Christmas.
This is for the Main Background, where the entire piece will end up attached to. (Remembering that blue/purple background I’ve got at the moment will all be covered up by split stitching).
Since telling colours on a monitor is so hard, and I use so much dupion anyway, I got a selection.


One of these just has to go with the coral/copper coloured threads in the wing. Or I shall be very annoyed. The intensely emerald green dupion I have stacks of goes with it, but I don’t want an emerald green background. I want something more neutral.
I also picked up a bright orange dupion for the backing of part of the butterfly – but I’ll talk about that when I get to it *grin* (Julie is reading these entries, so I’m not revealing any more that I have to as I go along…..)

The Large Wing

Here is the largest and most basic part of this piece – the split stitching fill-in of the large butterfly wing (it has a smaller wing to the rear). It’s only a little less than life sized in this image.
I had to divert somewhat from the original illustrator’s design in translating from illustration in shades of grey to 3 colours I could split stitch. I’ve used a little license to add in details that weren’t in the original drawing to make up for it, to be sure the wing was ‘interesting’.
I decided on split stitch rather than long and short stitch because there simply wasn’t enough room between the ‘wing pads’ to do L&S stitches in several colours.
I tried to put some texture in with the split stitching, most noticeably with the border, having a narrow band of the darkest colour, and a narrow band of the mid colour running around the outside edge, rather than always taking advantage of the maximum space and having longer, smoother stitches where I possibly could. I want that texture to be part of the definition of the wing.
The bit down the bottom tip of the wing is definitely a bit ‘suss’ in stitch direction (see how it has a ‘split’ or ‘fold’ going up it?) but I’m not too worried. That part will be covered when I add the smaller wing.
The wing pads were done on purple shot silk, with a mid-rib of purple thread + 2 strands of metallic copper thread. The veins were done in copper thread.
I did them twice, and discovered they actually looked better with less vein, not more – not trying to cover every pad of the wing pad with some vein.
I double back-stitched around the edge of each wing pad, then cut it out, and cut in little ‘v’s in the border.
I tried folding the edges over, and needle-rolling, but it just didn’t want to work. Perhaps because I backed the silk with muslim and it was just too thick?
I ended up sewing them on over the backstitching, and trimmed very close to the border. There is some ‘splintering’ of the silk at the sewn border, but that will be covered up.
If I weren’t going to use the method I’m going to use to cover the edges of the wing pads (wait and see what I do :-) but Rachel Wright of VirtuoSew Adventures suggested a good alternative today – buttonholing the edges.
It was thanks to my new “real thread” DMC colour card that I was able to select some threads, and then discover a toned third colour. Yay the real thread card  - it’s SO much better than the printed one.
The purple background (some kind of acrylic material, but I was a bit desperate) will all be covered in split stitch, then that large wing cut out.
I had some copper material I was going to use as background, but it doesn’t ‘go’ with the threads I’ve ended up with.
I had a look at my trusty
http://colorschemedesigner.com/
to get some ideas for the background colour.
This was the basic scheme :
 
I had a look through the complementary, triadic, tetratic etc schemes associated with this – the main colour in the middle being one I was using. and didn’t like any of the colours it came up with (lime green?).
I think I’ll go with a purple to match the wing pads.
It’s very Zen doing all this split-stitching, tho suprisingly hard to keep the stitches at the right angle (all pointing towards the top middle of the wing). I keep on putting them in horizontally!