Exploring Your Creativity
At this stage, you rarely (if ever!) follow a professionally written stitch guide exactly. You’re experimenting more boldly with color and want to expand your skills in choosing stitches and threads for your projects. Using the Stitch Guide Formula is becoming second nature, and with each project you complete, you feel more confident. You’ve built a solid working knowledge of needlepoint, and you’re eager to see how far your creativity can take you.
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The purple thread student undergoes the change from ambivalent to confident stitcher. A purple thread student begins to understand the meaning of the gold thread.
✔ I’m SO tired of using the same old stitches over and over.
✔ I’m ready for my projects to turn out like I picture them in my head — without a lot of ripping and re-stitching.
✔ I have lots of ideas for my canvases, but I don’t feel confident about how to actually put them into practice.
✔ I want my projects to make people say “WOW... how’d you do that?!”.
✔ Bored
✔ Restless
✔ In a rut
✔ Stitching painted canvases with stitch guides written by others
✔ Substituting your own stitch/thread choices for some elements in the stitch guides
✔ Writing partial stitch guides—making some stitch choices, but with a lot of input from others and still using a lot of tent stitch
Has all of the skills of a stage 1 - 3 stitcher + the following...
✔ Confidently stitches diagonal patterns
✔ Can work complicated stitches from diagrams with ease and compensate comfortably
✔ Can successfully work at least five advanced techniques on a needlepoint canvas, such as beading, needle felting, open work, pattern darning, thread painting/silk shading, stump work, silk ribbon, surface embroidery, or Turkey work
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To move to the next stage, you’ll need to…
✔ Use the Stitch Guide Formula™ to write stitch guides for three medium-size canvases, including thread choices, with little to no outside input. Each guide should incorporate multiple decorative stitches, at least one diagonal stitch pattern, and one special technique, using a variety of threads.
✔ Add samples of the Purple Thread stitches to your Stitch Reference Notebook (alongside White, Silver, and Turquoise)
✔ Successfully complete the canvases and have them finished into displayable items.
✔ Complete three additional Technique MasterClasses inside The Stitcher’s Club.
✔ Complete the Beyond Basketweave™ course and the Stitch Guide Formula™ course for additional support. (Recommended
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