Labor of (needlepoint) Love – Part Deux

Back in January, I created a stocking design for my friend Gretty (who would be needlepointing this for her little niece, Syd). With all the craziness that comes with moving, I have just now finished painting the design on needlepoint canvas last week – and it turned out quite well, according to moi, the artist and designer.

When I started needlepointing and saw the extremely high prices on painted canvases, I was a bit shocked. But now I know why. Here was my process:

I had to take get the design from the computer (I used Adobe InDesign)…

and put it onto paper. Because of the large size of a stocking, it won’t fit onto one piece of paper.

Then I taped the pieces together, making sure they were all lined up.

Next is cutting a piece of the canvas to fit the stocking design.

Then I busted out my lightbox…

and put the print out of the stocking design and canvas on top to trace the outline of the design onto the canvas with a pencil.

Since the lightbox is not large enough to hold the entire design at once, I had to carefully move the design and canvas (making sure they always were lined up!) 3 times to finish up the tracing of the design.

Whew! I am sure happy once the tracing is all done – it is my least favorite part of the whole process. Once I have the outline of the design, I paint (with acrylics) the colors from the design onto the canvas (this allows the needlepointer to know what color yarn to use where).

I start with the lightest color (in this case, yellow) and move to the darkest (so after yellow, orange, red, green, blue, purple, etc).

Then and only then, after all those steps, is the canvas complete! It took me about 3 hours to design (back at the beginning of the year) and about 4 hours to get everything on canvas. So definitely a labor of love, but isn’t it so cute?!  And pretty true to my original design, which is always a good thing!

I hope Gretty can be a needlepointing machine between now and Oct, so that the stocking can be sent off to the finished (as a stocking) in time for Christmas!

This project really made me want to get back into needlepointing more – esp. when sitting in front of the TV with Boom – a good way to multi task! And I definitely like designing my own canvases, so they can be more modern and graphic, instead of what you would typically think of as needlepoint.