At the October 17th guild meeting, a long-time member brought a painted canvas she had never worked. The masking tape around the edges cracked with age and one taped-side completely fell off as we’all looked at it. No one wanted to add it to their stash, but I couldn’t let the beautiful piece go into the dark again. Plus the guild has an ornament exchange in early December I need to make something for, and this is clearly a Christmas angel.
Once home I notice the color match most of my leftovers from the butterfly canvaswork piece, so double-score! The cotton floss is of unknown manufacture and doesn’t match typical DMC, being slightly thicker. I will need to puzzle out how many threads I will need for the work. The Butterfly canvas was all six-threads, but the holes were larger.
I’ve never worked an actual painted piece before, only pre-printed modern stuff like the butterfly. The cross’ed threads are clearly marked, instead of randomly printed. I plan to work this in mostly basketweave and continental stitch as a needlepoint/canvaswork embroidery. I might add some beads or gold accent thread when done, or do French Knots instead of beads.
Finishing is a toss-up between making it a cone to applique this to, to make it an angel topper for a tree, or just back it and make it a standard ornament.
10/19/2025 – Picture of the painted canvas as yet unworked. I will be putting it into a 4 x 8 scroll frame. The entire design fits into the contraption sideways.
10/25/2025 (Total time 6 hours) – Three nights plus a meeting resulted in six hours of work and the angel has wings and hair, little blue shoes to match her eyes, and the beginning of a dress. The green and red for the holy, dark pink for the skirt, white and yellow for the wings, light brown for the hair, and blue all came from the butterfly project. The dark brown came from a different project. Picture of the back provided as it can be hard to see what has been sewn with the painted canvas on front.
10/28/2025 (Total time 8.5; overall time 14.5) – Another three days (with meetings) and 8.5 hours of work. Most of the gown is done. I am mixing a lot of colors from the Butterfly project to stretch everything as far as I could, but it still wasn’t enough. I have done one trip to the store to buy two skeins of black DMC 310 to work the outline. The Butterfly project didn’t have enough and I didn’t want to change out the black outline midway through if I could help it. I will need another trip to Michael’s get a pink to finish the skirt. I am not including the time gathering the materials in the time count; I don’t count the set up time either. On the back picture, you can see how far the black embroidery has been completed and how much of the skirt still needs to be done.
12/6/2025 (Total time 8.5; overall time 23 hours) – After another bit of work (about 8.5 hours over four days), the angel is finally finished and the project is off the scroll frame. You can clearly see the signature of the person who originally painted the angel. Next comes the real hard part. I have to cut the canvas to make an ornament. I’ve never had to cut an odd shape on canvas before.
