Many years ago, I ran across a rug called Parasols by Thomas Paul and printed it on regular paper to see how it would look in a miniature scene (here in the Newport).
Although the paper printout photographs beautifully, I wanted to create something that looked more realistic in real life. I tried a specialty velour paper. The colors still weren’t as deep at they had been on the regular paper printout, but the texture was lovely.
I thought stitching the rug would be a good way to more accurately recreate the design. I would be certain to end up with the right coloration since I could match the embroidery floss to the paper printout.
I found a great site called pic2point (now defunct) where you can convert an image to a needlepoint pattern for free. The site created a pdf of the pattern, and I started stitching on 24 ct Congress Cloth. It was a lot of work, approximately 60 hours worth, and I wish I could say I loved it in the end. Needlepoint on a lower count fabric can look choppy, especially when there are a lot of curves to the design. The background also showed through more than I liked, and I ended up with more of an oval than a circle once I cut the rug from the cloth and turned the edges under.
This was all before I had done a miniature rug in French knots, which are such a great scale texture in miniature. I decided to make a new rug and used a transfer pen and tracing paper method using Aunt Martha’s Tracing Paper and a blue fine tip transfer pen from Sublime Stitching (as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases). I bought blue and black pens but used blue in this instance, because black lines can be hard to cover when stitching with white floss.
I took the velour paper printout and taped it to a sheet of non-transfer tracing paper. I taped the paper to the window in the afternoon light and traced the design using a fine point Sharpie.
I then flipped the Sharpie traced image over and traced it with the blue transfer pen onto the iron-on transfer paper. Having had ink shifting issues in the past, I taped the paper to the muslin fabric before ironing. The transfer ink didn’t spread very much if at all.
This is 3.5 hours of stitching.
