Uneven split diamond ideas have been sitting in my needlepoint inspiration album for a few years. I’m kinda excited about the variation I ended up with. (And thank you to Patricia Sone for some of the original inspiration.)
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The stitched sample is me playing with green Pepper Pot Silk (yellow lines) and four plies of blue Splendor (black lines) on 13M.
This sample screams fabric to me. I’m confident the color combination is an overwhelming component of that, but I would love to see this stitch as a bedspread or wallpaper/background. (It’s also possible the color combo was inspired by a Nordstrom window display I walked by this week.) There are way too many thread combos to choose from for those. Silk Lame (yellow lines) and silk floss (black lines) make sense to me for the bedspread. I would experiment with Flair (yellow lines) and a size 8 Perle Cotton (black lines) for a background. But! If the Flair goes rogue and spreads too much between the diamonds, I would change it to Neon Rays. And, if it’s Neon Rays, I would use a laying tool to make sure it stays flat and untwisted.
I would also consider ditching the yellow lines altogether. To glam it up a little bit, I would add five seed beads in the center of the diamonds. Add each seed bead over two rows on the vertical. The unevenness of the diamond centers would still be visible, but slightly less so. Also consider adding a bugle bead horizontally across the center for a more elegant bead addition.
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Just a reminder about how to evaluate stitches for size on your project.
As you are auditioning stitches (from any stitch source), count the number of canvas threads on the diagram that match your mesh size. And there you have what an inch of the stitch will look like. Evaluate that against the area where you plan to use the stitch and make your final decision. If you start integrating this step into your stitch selection process, you may be surprised at how many stitches you think are large are much smaller than you realize. (Or, in today’s case, the stitch is much larger than it looks.)
By (sometimes) including this step in my own process, I find I am now integrating much longer stitches than I ever thought I would. I used to think a stitch six rows long was super big. I have very much changed my tune, which has helped me expand my creativity, especially for large-space stitches.
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I hope you have the perfect spot for this stitch! Please enjoy! Have a wonderful #whimsicalwednesday!
A Note about Diagrams
I use color in diagrams to make them as clear as possible. The primary function of different colored lines is to illustrate a stitch sequence. For example, the layering of colors demonstrates you add them in that order. They can also provide ideas on integrating additional threads (one line for each color). Or, you can use the same thread for all color lines. That's where I encourage you to use your imagination for the space you are stitching!