Designing a Jeweled Fish (in Needlepoint or X-Stitch)

While looking at the painted canvas, I realized that this could also be done in counted cross-stitch on a colored fabric! The model is on 18 mesh canvas, so each little dot/stitch can be reproduced with a X-stitch on the fabric - on graph paper, this would appear as one square, so you might want to chart it that way first.

Anyway - this is a fish I traced from a book on tropical fish (can't remember the name of it right now), and then played with it a bit on doodle canvas to get an idea for embellishment - and voila! "jewels"!!

The jewels are on a 90 degree angle, which follows lines I drew first to get some ideas - and it worked! The jewels are in a setting of Kreinik metallic braid - #12 both in 002 gold and in silver for the little smyrna cross "beads." These are marked in blue on the canvas to easily distinguish from the gold settings.

To do your own, you might just follow what I did - or trace the outline of the fish (or find yourself a new one in a book or on the internet) and figure a wonderful and original pattern.

I'm planning to stitch several of these, as well as some shells I drew a number of years ago, on the other blog soon. On this fish, I'm seeing petite Very Velvet (Rainbow Gallery) with my favorite effect of the 002V metallic braid and lots of sparkle in the jewels. Also some DMC Satin Floss here and there for a great contrast in texture. I'll have some more shell freebies soon - I've been awfully busy lately, so am running behind.

ADDENDUM: For right now, I have the comments cut totally off, as a few nights ago, I had a horrendous spamming episode - and the only way I could stop it was to block and remove the entire comment section. I did this on the other blog also to take no chances. After this, I'll do the comment moderation thing, which I really didn't want to do. Oh well.