Canvas needlepoint was the first craft I ever learned, but I really haven't done any since my early teens. Those paint-by-numbers canvases done in tent stitch would probably go well with mid-century modern furniture, but my favourites have always been the long smooth stitches that spanned multiple squares of canvas. Brick stitch, say, or a Florentine flame stitch. Or go full rococo with bargello, tilting that mid-century look from the fifties to the sixties.
It so turns out that a knitter much cleverer than I has figured out how to get a bargello-type effect from knitted stripes. Xandy Peters calls her pattern Fox Paws because the tight crests of colour look like little paws reaching across the fabric. It makes a wonderful flame stitch, and does some interesting things with stacked increases and decreases that I've never seen before.
The yarn I'm using is from an old project I started about sixteen (!) years ago, and never got more than a few centimetres done on. All of the yarn is Butterfly mercerised cotton, which comes in wonderful colours and is great to work with... but maybe not for this pattern. Something with a little stretch, like wool obviously, would be much better.
Still, I like how the different stripe sections are coming out.
Do take a look at the project gallery on Ravelry. It's amazing how different such a distinctive pattern looks in different colour combinations and in different garment types.