Needlepoint Frame of Mind

This year hasn't seen a great deal of stitching from me, at least until I picked up a couple of needlepoint projects.  Over the past few weeks, I started one very large project and actually completed three small ones.

The large project is a sudoku puzzle that was designed by a member of my EGA chapter and offered there as a class.  The puzzle was already solved, luckily for me because I'm terrible at solving sudokus.  But the challenge to the stitcher comes from choosing colors and stitches to use.  The instructions included all the stitches and threads used on the original piece, but we were all encouraged to change as much or as little as we pleased.  It took me two months to select four stitches of my own and decide on which colors and threads to use.  The only restriction I gave myself was that the threads had to come from my stash.  The photo is of the center block, but I just finished a second block over the weekend, and started the third.

I also worked on two much smaller pieces.  One is an ornament designed by Tony Minieri (on the right in the photo).  I had bought the kit at a stash sale at last January's EGA meeting.  The kit didn't include all the threads, so I turned to my stash and made a couple of changes.  What I liked most about doing this piece was stitching the fancy triangular stitches in each corner.  They're called walneto stitches, and remind me of the Eiffel Tower.

The siamese cat canvas, by a designer named Julia, has been in my stash for about a decade because I just didn't know how to stitch it.  Should I stitch the white area on the cat?  Should I add a fancy background, or a border?  Or maybe a thread with long fibers to make the cat look longhaired?  What to do?  Finally, I decided that less is more with this piece.  It didn't need any fancy stitches or borders or backgrounds.  I used tent stitch in the black areas and left all the white unstitched.

There are a few more needlepoint projects in the pipeline.  I think my needlepoint stash is small enough that I might actually finish them all in my lifetime!