A young lady I used to work with has asked me to teach her how to do needlepoint. I am of course very willing to help and have gone shopping in my stash to come up with tools and such for her.
I’ve been doing needlepoint since I was in grade school, so I have lots of experience and tips. I don’t want to overwhelm her with advanced stuff that she doesn’t need now, so am hoping I can get some advice as to what a noob really needs to know because its been so long that I’ve forgotten.
I’m thinking, she needs to know how to start and end a thread, how to sort and count her floss, how to read and understand instructions and how to stitch (punch and pull). I haven’t given her anything that needs a laying tool, but I will probably demonstrate that to her as well.
I’ve come up with several large gauge painted canvas kits and a large gauge counted kit for her as well as assorted scraps of different sized canvas and floss to practice with.
What else do you guys think I should have or do for our first lesson. I want her to enjoy herself so she wants a second lesson!
Sounds great! I’m a surface-embroidery nerd myself and don’t really know about the counted-thread styles, but will you also need to address issues of framing or hooping to set up the work?
(Also, you may get more participation in arts-n-crafts type threads in Cafe Society? so you could ask a mod to move it if you like)
Wow, surface-embroidery is so complicated and so beautiful. I do my best to avoid it because my thread tension varies from day to day, or even hour to hour.
Good idea about addressing framing, she has seen me work with frames but that’s just one of the things where I’d just toss her the frame pieces and expect her to figure it out because everyone knows how its done. I’m maybe not so good at this teaching thing.
And thank you again for suggesting a forum move, I wasn’t sure when I posted and tossed tails when I should have gotten heads, LOL!
Yeah, though not so much when I do it, but I strive to improve! I’m a fanatical devotee of Mary Corbet’s needlenthread.com embroidery blog, and although most of her stuff is surface embroidery she does have several posts exploring aspects of canvaswork/needlepoint, if you want something for your student to check out. Her stitch tutorials are especially excellent, I think.
The hard part about teaching something you’re good at is that you’ve forgotten what it’s like to suck at it. So, total noob here:
Taught myself, and what helped immensely was to start with a plastic canvas with large-ish holes (see, I don’t even know the terms yet).
I figured "Hey, this is just like pixels! So before 8-Bit characters were a thing (70s/80s), I was drawing them on graph paper (like favorite comic book characters), then diving in with assorted colors of yarn… like, “Hey, what would a pink and purple Batman look like?”
The nice thing about the plastic is I didn’t have to worry about tension (or neatness, really), and got instant gratification.
While I would never discourage anyone from trying any sort of stitching, I’m not going to advise a noob to do a couple of simple needlepoint kits and then jump right into more complicated stuff like surface work or crewel. It would be kinda mean to set some up for failure like that. IMO.
@digs really has the right of it when they posted "The hard part about teaching something you’re good at is that you’ve forgotten what it’s like to suck at it. "
There is so much YES in this statement as far as I am concerned. I want to start her out with instant gratification while she is practicing, then let her go and fall off her own horses.
I recently revisited needlepoint after 40+ years. I was never proficient (and still not). It was a simple eyeglasses pouch kit that I got online, labelled “for beginners”. It looked ok from the front, but the back was a lumpy, tangled mess. I was never “taught” needlepoint, other than the basic stitch. One thing that stumped me way back when and still does is, when the hole is divided between two colors, which color thread do you use? (Sorry, I don’t know how else to phrase it). You’d think I could tell by the context of the image but it never seems quite right.
Also, as you mentioned, ending a thread. How do you not end up with a bunch of danglers on the back?
“I’m not going to advise a noob to do a couple of simple needlepoint kits and then jump right into more complicated stuff like surface work or crewel.”
Who on earth are you talking to? I don’t see where anyone here suggested anything like that. I certainly didn’t.