Gingerbread Church by Victoria Sampler 2: the roof, and stitching on black fabric

I’m stitching all the roof pieces for the Gingerbread Church design by Thea Dueck of Victoria Sampler  this week. I’m not that keen to stitch on black fabric usually, as I find it makes me tense up, and gives me headaches. So I reckoned I would get them all out of the way now.

So, if you want to have the black roof on this project (like I do), you’ll have to put up with the issues, and make it as painless as possible! The main problem is making the holes in the black fabric show up as clearly as possible.

When I started on the first roof panel, I was stitching in my conservatory, in bright sunlight. You can see from this photo above that there was just too much light around! It was quite difficult to count the fabric threads accurately.

So I turned the tapestry stand so that the fabric was as much in the shade as I could manage, and I also put a piece of white fabric on my lap, so that the holes of the black fabric showed up clearer and more consistently.

The roof panels don’t have all that much stitching on them, but they do have quite a few beads. Here’s the first piece finished:

I found that I needed guidelines in white thread placed first, to make it obvious where I would be attaching the small pearl beads, because if I’d just stitched on the snowflake ones first, the snowflakes themselves would be obscuring the fabric too much, and make it impossible to count accurately from their placement point to the three points above them.

So I stitched this temporary line horizontally, on the line where the snowflakes would eventually go.

From there. I could count up much more easily, and attach the lines of three pearl beads each time, and the individual ones in between the snowflakes.

Lastly, I attached the snowflakes, unpicking the guideline thread as I went. Here’s both roof pieces finished.

Then I stitched the steeple roof in the same way.

The steeple has four small triangles for the roof pieces. I tacked one guideline stitch where the snowflake would go, rather than a line.

These small roof pieces were very quick to do – only taking 45 minutes each!

That’s all the black fabric pieces finished – all the rest are to be stitched on the Zweigart 28 count evenweave ‘Cognac’ shade fabric.

 

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