Needlework Notes from Mackenzie House

Don't you long to have one of these to hold your knitting yarn? Last weekend my friend Mark and I visited Mackenzie House, a former home of the publisher and 1837 Rebellion leader William Lyon Mackenzie. Because of his newspaper publishing history, there's an antique printing shop in a rear addition to the home. This is used there (as you see) to hold a ball of twine, but apparently every knitter who goes through expresses a fervent wish to have one just like it. (In my case, it would go a long way towards solving the problem of cat attacks.

This "slipper chair"(a term for a low, armless upholstered chair) is one of the few original pieces of furniture in the house. It was needlepointed by Janet "Jennie" Mackenzie (1829-1906) sometime in the mid-19th century (the house has been restored to an 1860s appearance). She was a daughter of William Lyon Mackenzie who married Charles Lindsey, a newspaperman and biographer of Mackenzie.

I'm not crazy about the design myself, but I'm wondereing whether the colours might have been different when it was made 150 years ago. I'd like it better if the greens were less brown and drab... which perhaps they were. It shows a date palm and other tropical foliage; apparently Egypt was in vogue at the time. The pale blue background is worked with beads, which must have taken ages to do!

I do think the pleated green velvet edging is a clever workaround for getting the needlepoint to fit nicely over the curved edges of the seat. I'm pretty sure it would have been brighter back in the day. I wonder whether "Jennie" did the upholstery herself. It's held up very well!

Photo credit: Mark D'Aguilar

Parrot Pillows

Here are Bonnard (left), a red lory, and Bucky, a green conure. I made this pillow back in the early '80s to immortalize two of the parrots that inhabited my childhood home. The pillow is lasting far longer than they did (although they were both around for a fair few years).

I feel the left-hand bird works out better as a needlepoint design, but the one on the right does have a certain quality of Bucky, who tended to be a morose bird. I did acres more of the brown background than I needed to; the pillow was rectangular for a long time, but I ended up turning a lot of the extra background under when I rebacked it a year or two ago.

I think the canvas was ten stitches to the inch. I don't remember much more about it except that in those days I more than once worked on it while on the back of my boyfriend's motorcycle – which seems excessive to me now, but felt quite normal at the time.

Twin Needlepoint Pillows

These may be the oldest needlepoint projects I still own. Back in the late 1980s I became fascinated with textured stitches for needlepoint, and I experimented quite a lot with them. I also got very interested in colour interactions, and worked out a lot of patterns like this checkerboard of red, orange, beige and brown; the idea was to use a very dark colour with two pairs of hues: a light and a mid-tone of each. It gives a nice pop to the pattern.

The middles would probably withstand nuclear attack; they're a stitch I made up that consists of a dark-brown cross-stitch with coloured cross-stitch over it in the alternating holes. In fact, these are quite durable overall. I've been using them on chairs for more than 20 years; last year I replaced the velvet backing, which had become pretty threadbare. The fronts still look like new.

The Dollhouse Rug Installed

I visited my friend Susan today and had the pleasure of seeing my needlepoint dollhouse rug given a lovely spot in a very large Victorian dollhouse that resides in her living room. It's one of about 30 houses from various periods in history that she has collected, restored, decorated and furnished.

Now that the rug is in place, the faults don't seem to show up so badly. I'm quite happy with the outcome of what I think was probably about 70 hours of stitching.

Petit-point Dollhouse Rug

This is a petit-point dollhouse carpet I worked for my friend Susan, who collects dollhouses from many periods in history. The pattern came from a book called Needlework in Miniature by Virginia Merrill and Jean Jessop, which seems to be still in print. It's a great resource for anyone crazy enough to want to do this sort of thing; it has lots of patterns, as well as instructions on things like how to reupholster doll furniture with your own needlework.

There are people who run businesses creating (much better) carpets for dollhouses, and they can be rather pricey. This one essentially cost nothing but my time (on and off, close to two years of pleasant bus rides and TV movies), since I made it out of a spare 8" by 9.5" piece of embroidery canvas and various skeins of embroidery silk I already owned (people somewhat often give me odd lots of embroidery floss they have lying around because they know I'm crafty and will happily take it off their hands.)

That having been said, you may be able to notice that I didn't quite have enough yellow to do it all in one colour. (The salmon pink is actually the same throughout; it just looks paler at the bottom because of the lighting in the room.)

Also, I could have done a better job with the background yellow. A good trick for filling in large swathes of colour is to stitch diagonally. I did this, but left space for some of the blossoms in the middle of the field. Especially on the right, you can really notice where the edge of one lot of stitching ends and the next begins.

In the lower right corner, I tried to give a good look to the edge by stitching around it; a sort of binding. I didn't like the way it looked, though, so for the rest of the rug I actually turned the canvas under as I worked it and stiched through two layers at once: the top layer and the turned-under bottom layer. It's a little fussy to do and it leaves a tiny white canvas edge, but it's very neat. (I didn't want to unpick the first edging attempt because I trimmed the canvas so close to the stitching that I was afraid I'd start to unravel the carpet itself.)

If I ever do another one, I think I'd be able to come up with a more finished look. Meanwhile, I expect Susan will be able to place some furniture strategically over the most problematic areas.

A Needlepoint Wedding Pillow

I made this needlepoint pillow as a wedding present for a couple of friends who live in England and who had an 18th-century theme for the wedding. I've pushed the historical period a bit; the clothes I've shown here would actually be right for the period from about 1790 to 1800.

I designed the front. The portraits are based on photos, and I tried to draw their cat from my imagination. Notice that I ran out of the darker olive green I was using for the bushes (right), so I had to finish the left in a paler, less dynamic colour.

The border of fruit, flowers and insects is taken from a pattern in a book called Flowers, Birds and Unicorns: Medieval Embroidery by Candace Bahouth. The inside picture in the book is an orangerie. The back is green velvet, and I bought some ready-made green satin cording for the edging. It's silly, but fun.