Venetian Disguise
With all the lines I had drawn clearly visable as I sew, my biggest decisions were what stitches to use to create a wall, balcony, window frame, roof-top, gondola, bridge or window pane. With hundreds of stitches to choose from I would stitch a row or two on a seperate piece of fabric and then choose which I liked best.
As was my habit when painting, I started with what I deceided would be the most difficult part of the canal scene...the gondola. Although I have been around boats of all shapes and sizes nearly my whole life, I was never very good at drawing them. And working in this realistic free-style thread-painting method of embroidery, requires some drawing skills in order to keep lines moving in a convincing direction.
I did encounter a few problems along the way with puckering of the silk especially at the bow and stern of the gondola. I resolved this issue by cutting off the puckered fabric around the boat and creating a reverse applique in the water.
As I neared completion of the embroidery, I noticed some puckering along the roof-tops that I was unable to tame. So, before I pinned the silk down to the batting and backing fabric, I cut out the entire scene flipping the raw edge to the backside and appliqued it back onto it's original background, smoothing out any puckers as I went. I now had the whole embroidered canal scene appliqued and ready to be joined to the other half of the quilt.
Layer upon layer of thread and fabric and just over 100 hours later, I had a Venetian canal scene that measured around 4 feet by 3 feet.
You can see in these photos of the early stages of the embroidery that the silk had already begun to pucker. I think working so much detail into the gondolia before stitching in the surrounding areas was the cause of this. Also,it is the only sizable horizontal embroidery in the scene and I believe this added to the tension in the fabric. You can see in the second photo of the gondolier how I cut out the puckering and satin-stitched this area back into place.
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