The stitching started at the top with the roof. A 4-ply Splendor S881 in an Upright Cross Stitch was chosen to give some texture as well as having easy compensation in the curved space.
I wanted the blue grid to give an impression of metal bars, so the chosen stitch needed to have some continuity. Also, the vertical lines were not painted along the same thread and would have led to skewed and twisted bars, so some artistic license was taken to adjust the vertical lines. Doing a Diagonal Gobelin would help create a sense of roundness. The vertical area was stitched as one contiguous unit and the horizontal area was broken by the vertical bars. The thread used was Silk Lame Braid SL15. The fill area also used the same stitch using Flair F572.
The blue walls surrounding the window were very small areas so no detailed stitch could be used. The Basketweave stitch in Pebbly Perle P52 for the yellow accent matched the Flair fill and the walls were done with 4-ply Splendor S929.
Since I wanted to get a better understanding of the pink and purple accents, I stitched the blue windows next. The frames were done in Basketweave using Trebizond S10 Lapis (one of my favorite blues). The windows were unequal in width, so the repeating theme of the Elongated Rice Stitch looks different in each window. The shiny base was Soft Sheen Fyre Works FT36 and the overstitch was a 2-ply Splendor S965. To avoid a misfitting compensated area, the tops of the windows were left with only the shiny thread appearing.
Now to do the pink and purple accents. I wanted to unite both areas with some common color/thread that was done in a vertical pattern. After hunting through my books, Jane Zimmerman's Canvas Embroidery Volume Two came thru again! On page 86, I found an Oblong Cross Stitch variation. These vertical threads were laid over every other column and the cross stitch would go on top. Because of the thread weights, the entire space would be filled in and would also allow the 2-ply Gumnut Stars 179 to peak through. The Gumnuts would become the unifying common thread. While laying the base, I discovered that the vertical lines were broken up by the shape of the accent areas. To still have some curvature, I went down when the accent color ended and up when it started again, leaving the yellow wall untouched. I also made sure that the total number of horizontal threads in a broken length was in units of 2 threads. A complete cross stitch was 4 threads tall and a compensated cross stitch was only 2. To insure that the stitched areas would not look ragged, I chose to do the thread counting. This caused the shapes to not exactly follow the original design, but the concept was still followed. The Cross Stitch was a tied and offset 2x4 cross unit, executed in diagonal rows as best as could be done in these awkward shapes. The large Cross Stitch was 2 threads wide and 4 threads high, with a small Cross Stitch over the intersecting threads. The laid lines served as the base for the Cross Stitch. Splendor in a 2-ply was used for the Cross Stitch. The pink was S845 and the purple was S1145.
Finally the yellow wall was stitched. As I was starting in the top right area, I noticed a space for a small architectural accent. A Smyrna Stitch in 4-ply Splendor S909 fit perfectly. The rest of the wall was stitched using the random length Split Gobelin stitch going from top to bottom. (See earlier posts for further insight.)
And the stitch guide
The rice stitch windows are my favorites in this part, but really the star of this section is how cleverly you choose stitches that would mimic the flow of the piece instead of finding stitches that exactly fit over what was painted. It takes a confident and experienced stitcher to see what will do this instead of copying the paint job.
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