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Posts tagged ‘needlepoint kits’

The Needlepoint Mini-Brick Door Stop

My great-aunt, Mrs. Jo, loved to do needlepoint. She was prolific! She was always looking for something new to do. My mother, sister, and I would bring her printed pillow tops, bell pulls, and seat covers. When she finished these, and if we were slow in bringing her new projects, she would use the left over yarn to make brick covers with random triangle patterns. The covered bricks were our door stops. So, I didn’t have slamming doors until the covers wore out recently.

Mrs. Jo has been dead for over 30 years. I was on my own to make new ones. Bricks are BIG! On my trip to Home Depot to buy a brick, I discovered that all bricks are not created equal and there is a myriad of size choices, including a small “paver.” I wasn’t sure that the paver would be heavy enough to hold the door open, so I bought one for a test. To my delight, it worked – less time, fewer stitches, less yarn, less canvas. Voila, the mini-brick!

The pavers are 6” x 3” x 1.8”. The overall dimension of the design on my Needlepaint–custom needlepoint canvas was 10” x 7” and the design was inspired by Dover Publications Celtic Art books with CD-ROM.

I framed up my canvas and went to work. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly the 14 point canvas worked up, compared to the larger brick I had finished previously. Also, having used a large scroll frame(12” x 12”), the canvas remained square and need very little blocking.

I used a variation of Henry Babcock’s instructions for finishing the brick , which was that I wrapped the brick in flannel to protect my Needlepaint canvas. Then I followed Henry’s directions. Now I have one less door slamming closed.

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NeedlePaint Inspiration, Needlepoint

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St Patrick’s Day NeedlePoint

Instead of just needlepointing a normal photo, this week I was thinking that it could be fun to add a theme around an image on a custom needlepoint kit.

St. Patrick’s Day is a great opportunity!

I was thinking a clover with your dog in the middle would look pretty cool!  It took me a little while to find what I wanted, but as I’m learning to edit photos better, I found that taking the face works pretty well.

St Patricks Day Doggie Artwork

Below, we have just 10 colors on a 12” square canvas.  I did 18 mesh in this case, to catch the details in the dogs eyes.

St. Patricks Day Needlenoint Doggie Kit

Of course the ideas here are unlimited!

If you are interested in having us help to design a background photo, please contact us, we’d be happy to talk over some ideas and help create your design for you.  We offer this service free of charge on orders larger than 12 x 12”.

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NeedlePaint Inspiration, Needlepoint

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Amazing Photo’s Make Great NeedlePoint Kits

Recently, I was came across some amazing stitching work done by Su Embroidery Studio.  I found their work at Mary Corbet’s Needle ‘N Thread blog.  If you have time, you need to see these images!  This got me thinking about how many beautiful animal portrait needlepoint kits we’ve made at NeedlePaint.com and how thrilled the response has been by our customers.

Normally, people will send in the best images of their pet, but I think that there is a lot more opportunity for people who are looking for other types of special projects.

One of the great things about NeedlePaint.com, is that we are 100% custom, so if you can’t find great needlepoint kits of your favorite animals, you can have us make it for you!  I’m using the bald eagle as an example.  I searched and I could not find anything really good.  You can see my search results below.

Product Search Results on Google

After that, I just looked for images of “bald eagle head”, and found thousand of spectacular images.  Please be careful not to select a copyrighted image, if you cannot find a free image, then I recommend going to iStockPhoto.com There you can view thousands of animal photos that cost under $5.  You can purchase the XSmall size.

Source Image for Bald Eagle Canvas

Next, I uploaded this picture onto NeedlePaint and look how great it looks!

NeedlePaint Preview on 12 x 12" white 14 mesh canvas

I can imagine thousands canvases for people who love ducks, cows, and all types of animals.  Istockphoto really has a great selection of both farm and wild animals, just type in the name and enjoy!

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NeedlePaint Inspiration, Needlepoint

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Needlepaint Traditions

Most of us have our favorite causes to which we devote time, energy and often money. One of mine is The Colorado Trail, a 500-mile Denver to Durango hiking trail that was built by and is maintained by volunteers. With the launch of Needlepaint .com, I decided that the Colorado Trial logo would look great on a custom needlepoint pillow and would made a wonderful door prize that the annual Christmas party in Golden, Colorado.

The logo is a simple stylized green mountain on a white background. Maybe a little too much white for a pillow?

So, why not needlepoint it in reverse! (needlepaint screen shot)

This was a perfect project for something other than the traditional continental stitch. The lettering was done in an embroidery-styled satin stitch, working where possible with vertical and horizontal stitches to cover the canvas completely. The white mountain was done in the Shingle stitch, the green center of the mountain in Leaf #3 stitch, and the background in Giant Knitting from The Needlepoint Book by Jo Ippolito Christensen.

The pillow was finished with matching green cotton piping and backing over a 10-inch polyester-filled form from JoAnn Fabrics .

The finished pillow made it to the 2009 Colorado Trail Christmas Party. It was not given away but auctioned off bringing in $200.00. In 2010 another Colorado Trail volunteer came forward to needlepoint a second pillow which was also auctioned. We may have started a tradition. Why not do it for your favorite group?

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NeedlePaint Inspiration, Needlepoint, Pillows

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Retro Needlepoint Design Inspiration

Coming up with cool ideas for needlepoint kits is not always easy.  As great designs come in, I’m always amazed how creative people are!

From my side, I’ve always appreciated the internet for its ability to help spur great ideas, so going forwards, as we come across fantastic websites for needlepoint designs, we’ll put them in a specific category called ‘NeedlePaint Inspiration’.

So where to start?

I recently found a pretty fun website where artists put up their work, it is very modern and fun. http://tewi.us/tegaki/ I found this site via Mr X Stitch’s contemporary needlecraft blog.  Also, we’ve had some traffic coming from Sprite Stitch, which is a website that people can show their love of stitching and older video games.

This site Tewi.us,  is almost all animated images, so  I pulled out a few colorful ideas to try on NeedlePaint.

Original Images

NeedlePaint Canvas Previews

The canvases came out really well, I did 12″ high, with 14 mesh, and all the kits use below 20 colors.

I did have one interesting thing to show to our users, which was on the violin player.  Originally, the website selected 40 colors, (see left), but I figured that would be very hard, so I reduced it all the way to 11 colors and it still comes out great! (see right)

Left Image has 40 colors, right has only 11!

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NeedlePaint Inspiration, Needlepoint

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Awesome Turtle Needlepoint

I was inspired by one of our customers beautiful needlepoint kits.

It was a beautiful turtle, gliding in the ocean, and the image came out amazing.  I’m hoping that once they finish the canvas, they will send us images, but in the meantime, I went looking for some pictures to see how it would turn out.

I found an image on photo bucket which I uploaded to NeedlePaint.com (the original image was 1280 x 1024 pixels)

Image from PhotoBucket.com

I decided to stick with NeedlePaint’s recommendation, and left the size, color, and canvas mesh as original, and look how good it came out!

Preview of a NeedlePoint Turtle!

There are lots of opportunities for new projects.  Just pick your favorite animal, and do a google image search.

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Needlepoint

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Dog NeedlePoint Kit Tips

Dog Needlepoint Kits have to be one of the most popular themes at NeedlePaint.  Not only do we put them on our homepage, but our craft space and warehouse also is dog friendly with normally 1-3 dogs here on any given day.

As they are such great friends, I’m writing today to help people who have amazing photos of their dogs to select the best photos for needlepointing.

First of all, face images look best, but you do NOT need an actual close up photo.   So, I cropped the image of only Rusty’s face to 267 x 277 pixels. (upper left)

Rusty on a Hike

Rusty as a 10 x 9.5" NeedlePoint Canvas Preview

OK, so that is not as good as I hoped.

But, I think there is a lesson here.  Lets go back to the original image.  The background is very similar color to the dog, which when transferred to needlepoint, will loose a lot of contrast.  Also, the shadow below the dogs nose effects the dogs face on the canvas.

So, lets try another.  This one is a closer image, again, the top of the head came out well, but the bottom of the image is too dark.

 

Another Rusty, Closer Up! The cropped image was 533 x 531 Pixels

Hmm.  Still not what I want.  I think trying to focus even closer on the face may help.

Our Best Rusty Today

Yep, it looks better.  So, cropping very close to the face looks better to me.  This is a 10 x 9″ canvas preview, with 16 colors.  The cropped image was 408 x 363

Overall, I have to say, that I tried a lot of uploading today and I learned a few things.

#1.  Photo Image size should be at least 250 pixels x 250 Pixels for a 10″ x 10″ canvas

#2.  Images with a contrasting background seem to look better.

#3.  Dogs with markings really look great!  See the image of my friends husky.

Bear - Cropped Image size 311 x 390 pixels

On a final note, we are soon adding DMC threads to our site.  This will also help our current situation, because DMC offers more colors, especially in the lighter pinks, browns, and creams.  We’ve noticed improvement on images of people, which is the main reason for this, but I think Rusty will also look better!

If you are using NeedlePaint and having trouble, you can email me your image, and I will adjust it and try to help!  My email address is seth (at) needlepaint.com

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Needlepoint

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Lake Picture Turned into Needlepoint!

Dock 1

Written By: Peggy Bond

It has become a summer ritual at my lake in Maine to print an annual picture of my neighbor’s dock. This summer I decided to do a needlepoint picture instead of a glossy photo print using Needlepant.com so I could do a needlepoint picture instead.

I had 2 photos from which to choose.

After viewing them on the Needlepaint web site, I decided that Dock1 had too much going on in it. There was too much going on in the background. The blue and white paddle boat wasn’t recognizable, the green plastic chair disappeared into background, and the kayaks were distraction.

Dock 2

Dock2 by comparison was simple with the focus on the pink and white chairs with a good reflection in the lake. The background was not too detailed and the preview on Needlepaint.com reminded me of an Impressionist painting.

Next I decided that I wanted my finished Needlepoint canvas to be an 8 x 10 and on 14- point canvas. I made a copy of the photo and I used a photo editor to crop the copied picture to the 8 x 10 proportions. I cropped out as much of the background as possible, making the chairs the major element of the piece.

Dock 2 Cropped

Then I went back to Needlepaint.com and upload Dock2-cropped:

The first Needlepaint preview displayed the canvas with 20 colors. Although it looked great, I could see that it would be too difficult to needlepoint. There were too many different greens whose colors were so close that I would not be able to keep the colors straight. Also, these slight variations were not necessary.

NeedlePaint Preview 20 Colors

So I moved the Adjust Thread Colors slider on the website toward “Less”, and finally settled on a thread count of 10 with colors which were very close to the original preview. (Each time I moved the slider, the number of colors changed as did some of the colors. I tried many, many variations and even uploaded the picture several different times before I got exactly what I wanted. I just kept trying until I got my final choice.)

This canvas gave me enough definition to capture the idea of  the photo and to produce a canvas on which the colors would be easy to follow. And, it was the Impressionist effect which I wanted.

I ordered this canvas with thread. My Needlepaint shipment arrive

Complete Lake Photo Needlepoint Kit

with the following:

  • the color-printed canvas with my dock picture,
  • a gridded color print-out of my picture,
  • color-coded thread guide,
  • 6-strand Presencia embroidery threads to complete my canvas, and
  • a tapestry needle.

I put the canvas on my stretcher and was ready to go.

I started out being very careful to follow the gridded color print, but then I realized that I was Needlepainting this canvas. I could do use my pallet of threads to enhance or smooth over areas of the print. This meant that I didn’t have to worry

Finished Needlepoint of the Dock!

about the one light green stitch that was in the middle of the dark green. Or, if I wanted more light green in an area I could put it in. There was enough thread to make these changes as Needlepaint gave me full skeins of each color even it I only had a few stitches in that color. Also if I needed more, I could request more. I did need more dark green. I emailed Needlepaint and the thread arrived 4 days later in the mail. WHAT FUN!  IT IS PAINTING WITH THREAD with a little help from the printed canvas.

Once finished, I mounted it on Self-Stick Artboard (acid free).

Then I framed it with two contrasting matt boards. A wonderful memory of Summer, 2009.

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Needlepoint

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