Melitastitches4fun's Blog

You may have thought I got lost on the Tar River Trail by Gail Stafford since it’s been a month since I posted on this.

It took a lot of sessions because the trees have about a dozen different colors spread throughout done in French Knots except for the leaves on the right side. Gail’s two maps were fantastic by indicating where to focus the different threads. I used all of several skeins. The finishing touches added even more to the depth in the scene.

I thought I was done until I set it across the room and realized that Gail’s stitched piece definitely had less sky showing than mine.

Although it looked good to me at this point, I added more threads concentrating them in the center.

Then, more along the top.

That led me to add more on the left until it was almost as full as Gail’s. This is now one of my husband’s favorite pieces. Mine, too. We do love the fall season. I also love that it’s done! I started it 12 years ago at Seminar. It was my second seminar, and it was tough for me then. Now, I have more experience, and with Gail’s Landscape class earlier this summer, I had no problems except deciding when to stop!

Since there were so many threads in the kit, the second thing I did (first was place on Evertites) was divide threads by area. Gail Stafford does a great write-up for placement. Besides the finished photo, she also provides 2 different color coded maps for general thread placement.

The third thing was to clean up the spaghetti threads that had been left on there since class. I had a clump of away waste knots that I thought were badly done French Knots!

Then, I wandered between the background areas and along the path. Once that was done, I was able to add the trees on the left side during the Central Jersey Chapter Meeting and Stitch-in on Saturday and the rest were done mostly during the British Open (golf) the following day. A few more very thin tree limbs get added as part of the finishing touches.

My oldest unfinished ANG Seminar piece is from another Gail Stafford class from 2012, Tar River Trail. It is a lovely autumnal scene.

The pre-class letter says only a few stitches are used with a variety of threads. The 18 count canvas was supplied as a line drawing with some areas painted for reference. The kit has 9 Weeks Dye Works skeins of floss, 1 skein of Waterlilies, 3 skeins of Watercolours, 15 skeins of DMC Floss, 4 skeins of The Gentle Art Sampler and Simply Shaker Threads, and 3 skeins of ThreadworX floss. That’s a lot of threads.

So, this is my starting point. I left my spaghetti threads from class all this time. It still looks challenging! But I am confident that I can do it.

My first task was to transfer the canvas from the very thin bars to Evertites. Then, I reread the instructions, and now I am excited to see the scene develop.