Photoless Friday (05): how do YOU organize your yarns?

I am organized in certain areas of my life and house. My desk is usually a mess (though, really, I do know--pretty much--what are in those piles organized by subject matter), but my needlepoint yarn drawers are pretty darn tidy...More......

One small drawer is dedicated to my patterns that I worked up in StitchPainter together with the inspiring material, the one, or two, ready-made patterns I have bought (and never made up, but I sure do enjoy looking at them!), lots of inspirational photos in folders, a couple of small nice frames picked up on sale (why do they never work for the project at hand?), the roll of masking tape to finish off the edges while working the canvas, a couple of extra needles (never at hand when desired, but always THERE when searching for something else), and a sample of plastic canvas I wanted to try for seeing how to needlepoint tissue box covers and Christmas time gingerbread houses (maybe if I combined those two concepts, I'd actually DO it), my Paternayan yarn sample color chart with some handwritten notes. That's about it.

The other two somewhat deeper drawers are dedicated to my spare yarns, each grouped by color families into clean big baggies. I'm still working on some colors bought 15 years ago, folks!--those are the ones I should start using to do the outer two stitch rows just for firming up the stitching, you know, the rows that get sewn into the margins, so unseen. I have a pretty good sample of typical colors I use, though it always seems that there's never enough of the one I want for any particular project (especially cream, as I use that a lot for backgrounds).

Wish I had more space, but it looks like the situation is going to go the other way. I've got to move in the next couple of months (Cosmos help me), and those drawers are now going to be needed for pesky things, such as clothes.

I do have some clear plastic containers that will probably have to do, and go under the bed. Yuck. But the available space (and budget) is what is is.

I'm tellin' ya, if I win the lottery, my new house is going to have a huge bedroom just for my needlepointing and sewing supplies and activities.

How do YOU organize your yarns and other craft supplies?

Cornucopia (4 of 9)

A horn of plenty. How could such a positive good omen lack in the composite image of 9 small images (all inspired by the Victorian needlepoint book, but designed freehand by me on the StitchPainter program; see bibliography and link list) set within a decorated "frame."

From whence cometh my profile picture?

From whence cometh my profile picture? It’s a detail of an...More......18” prayer cushion that I made for a friend, who is very religious. The design is based on the ceiling of the (so-called*) Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, Italy (for a pretty good, but slightly dark, photo available online, though not the source of my work, see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/breic/197358235/) of the 5th century A.D., in the Early Christian period.

I used just the central crucifix and surrounding “crystal” spheres into which the heavenly stars were suspended (according to ancient and medieval astronomy), without the figures of the Four Evangelists (which would have ended up too stylized in such a “small” image).

If you are going to Italy, and love gorgeous art, I highly suggest spending a few days visiting the mosaics in the Early Christian and Byzantine churches in Ravenna!

Not wanting to put my own portrait photo online, for reasons of privacy, I realized that a detail of the starry sky of my needlepoint would be a perfect icon for my profile.

The design is a good example, too, of being liberally inspired by an image, without copying exactly…I drew the circles on my canvas with a compass, and positioned the stars freehand.

(*The building was not identified as a mausoleum, nor are there any records of the sarcophagi, until the 9th century A.D. and the Carolingian epoch, fixated, as it was, for important political, cultural and religious reasons, on relics. The little cruciform building—now a good three yards/meters shorter, due to the build-up of dirt and detritus over the centuries—was, in my opinion, a sacristy; see my M.A. thesis, 1983, on the So-Called Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, thesis advisor Dr. D. Brinkerhoff, Univ. of California at Riverside)

A rose by any other name...

So what's up with the name of my blog? I couldn't resist putting it in Latin. For one thing, it means the blog starts with an "A," and so, hopefully, will be alphabetized at the top of web lists. Latin also is a tersely lovely (though difficult) language. "Ars" for "Art." "Acupicturae" for "painting with a needle" in the genitive form (that's the "possessive" for you and me). "Stellae" for "Star's." (See: http://www.latin-dictionary.org/A/2/acupictura)

Needlepoint stitches

There are lots of needlepoint stitches and varying definitions of needlepoint. I use one of the most common,...More......the tent, or continental, stitch (please see my diagram). It's easy, it doesn't vary in size, or orientation (right-handed in the diagram), and, although I do vary color, I do not vary yarn texture, nor do I use specialty threads. As found in Leon Battista Alberti's mid-15th century advice for painters, I prefer to try to achieve the affects with color, not using the substances (ex., gold, precious stones), themselves.

I sometimes use a frame, it does help keep the canvas straight, but find it cumbersome, especially if I want to take the needlepoint with me in a travel bag. Hence, afterwards, I have to straighten the dampened needlepoint on a gridded surface ("blocking").

Welcome! (first post)

Welcome! I'm so glad that you, too, are interested in hand-done needlepoint (no machine-work, please!). I'm looking forward to sharing this passion with you.

How did I start? Eons ago,...More......I began with embroidery, and enjoyed it mightily, but life got in the way, and so I set it aside. Years later, by chance, I got a needlepoint kit (quinces) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and I was hooked! Granted, it had been fun to use the different kinds of stitches available in embroidery, but being forced in needlepoint--which, for those of you new to needlepoint, uses one single simple stitch--to get various effects just by varying the colors was a challenge so fascinating that, many years later, I'm still having loads of fun designing and executing my own needlepoint art.

I use single threads of Paternayan yarn (no advertisement intended, and no sponsorship received for this ad...unfortunately!) and 18-point canvas. For those of you new to needlepoint, that means 18 holes to an inch of needlepoint canvas, a size that allows a good amount of detail where desired, without being too tedious when filling in the backgrounds. (Yes, I know it's possible to use even smaller yarns in the detailed areas, and larger yarns in the backgrounds, but I personally just don't like these jumps in size in the same image.) How long does this take? I find that the simple filling in of about 1" x 8" background (i.e., not counting carefully for detailed areas) takes me all evening.

For designing my projects, if not directly by hand, I use a marvelously flexible program called StitchPainter (no advertisement intended, and no sponsorship received for this ad...unfortunately!), which also allows the user to import photographs, and turn them into gridded designs.

In this non-commercial blog, I'll be turning my designs, photographs and works into images, which you can use, too, for your non-commercial purposes only, if you should like them. (Until further notice--and maybe forever--, all ads appearing on this blog are not of my doing, but come from Google itself...a small "price to pay" for getting the web space and blog modules for free!)

What is my approach to design, and what am I working on, now? I'll answer these questions in following posts!

Bye for now, Star