textile dreams – fibery wake up

After finding Jocelyns Needlepoint Box Tutorial over at Pins and Needles, I was running wild with ideas to make my own. But where to start? I hadn’t done any needlepoint for quite a while and wanted to start simple, but with my own design nevertheless. At the library an old friend came home with me: Canvas Embroidery by Peggy Field and June Linsley. Concentrating on creating your own designs from the very first embroidery project, this book gives lots of avenues to explore.

One of the first exercises suggested is to start with a small square in the middle of a design and build up a sqare project by adding borders around that square. Simple to just start and design as you go along, and the perfect lid for a square box! So here’s what I ended up with:

Lid for Needlepoint Box

Apart from using stitches from the book, the last two wider borders are from the Stitch of the Month page of the American Needlepoint Guild. The inner one is 6×6s, and the outer one a Herringbone border variation. I really like the design, the only thing I’ll do different next time is to take some colour to the canvas before stitching so the white of the canvas doesn’t stick out so badly in the places where it’s visible.

Now I need to stitch the sides of the box using the same borders, and build and assemble the box, which will be quite a bit of work. I think these boxes are a brillant idea to use needlepoint for, since I find stitching pictures to hang on the wall gets old after a while.