Satin stitch and me, we’re not friends. Maybe it’s me. See, I’m a bit impatient sometimes, and taking the time to outline every single shape I want to satin stitch, and then only using a single thread (out of the six in DMC stranded cotton) seems so tedious I can almost never bear it. So I skip the outline and use two or three strands, and then end up with something messy I am not happy with. Sigh.

Mr. Xstitch recently featured an excellent article about filling stitches called Improving Your Stitch – Filling Out, by Stichalicious. She discusses common mistakes in filing stitches, especially in satin stitch. I have to say I am guilty of all of them at one point or another. The article got me thinking, so when I saw a pretty pattern in The Anchor Book of Crewelwork Embroidery Stitches (Eve Harlow, 9780715306321), (discussed in an earlier post) that featured a lot of satin stitch, I figured I would finally take the time and give it the best shot I could.

The results aren’t perfect, but they are so above and beyond what I have done in the past that I am super proud of myself. Sometimes, yes, the angles on the stitches do not stay perfectly parallell for the whole leaf. I probably should have done the top red part as one long satin stitch piece instead of doing it petal by petal. There are a few miniscule gaps that show up sometimes, and sometimes two threads overlap and mar the smooth surface. But overall, I am super happy with it.

As I progressed in the piece, I could definitely see my satin stitch improving. The best stitches are on the bottom of the piece, the worst ones being at the top where I started. Practice, practice, practice!

There are very few other stitches used throughout the piece. I used french knots in clusters inside the flower, a sort of mock thorn stitch over split stitch for the thorny yellow tendrils, and the most of the leaves and stems were done in split stitch. “Real” split stitch, split from underneath.

I ordered one of those fancy cross stitch-able iPhone cases on the Internet, in black. I didn’t know what to expect, but I am pretty pleased with it!

First off, the rubber is quite bendy, making it a bit harder to navigate your needle into the corners. The squares are also all perfect, so there is no need to be piercing through the plastic at any point. The holes are kinda small, but I think it’s only because I am being stubborn and using the whole six strands of my DMC floss. Why am I being stubborn? Cause I’m trying Bargello for the first time and want the best coverage possible.

According to Wikipedia: Bargello is a type of needlepoint embroidery consisting of upright flat stitches laid in a mathematical pattern to create motifs. The name originates from a series of chairs found in the Bargello palace in Florence, which have a “flame stitch” pattern.

A few years ago I found a book in a used book store called The New World of Needlepoint. It has super awesome, super sixties/seventies designs for needlepoint, Bargello and cross stitch, in absolutely terrible colour schemes. Of course I loved it and had to buy it. I had never had any canvas to work with, so I had simply looked through it up to now.

I was totally going to do cross stitch on the phone case; I even found this awesome blank template in order to map out what my pattern would look like. And then, I saw the worn purple book on my bookshelf, and all thoughts of cross stitch flew out of my head. After poring over the illustrations a few times, I finally settled on a simpler pattern, mostly because I didn’t know how hard working with the plastic case would be.

I did decide to change it up a bit near the middle, doing a full set of rows twice as tall as the rest of the case to break it up. I really love how it looks, and I love the colours I chose too. The best way to work Bargello, according to the book, is to work one horizontal line very carefully and slowly; the ones above and below it will fall naturally into place after it!  Again, I was being stubborn, and had the hurt fingers to go with it; by the end, I was using a small pair of pliers to pull the needle through, and that worked great.  With a few breaks, I finished the piece in about two days, so I’m super proud.

All photos for this post were taken with my iPhone, because I am a dork.

This beautiful ombre dress pattern came out from Urbanthreads a few weeks ago. It is super delicate and adorable, and I wasn’t going to let the fact that I do not have an embroidery machine stop me from stitching it up. The hand embroidered version of the pattern is a bit chunkier than the machine version. I printed it out and started playing with coloured pencils, filling it a little bit at a time. After a few minutes, I stopped and looked at what I had done and really really liked it. It still looked airy and dainty with only a few splashes of colour.

I sent a picture to my friend Rebecca, whose response was: “Are you going to do it with beads or just stitching? Are beads going to look tacky?” Heck no! I went out to the bead shop and picked out two pretty pink seed bead bottles in different textures (one matte, one shiny) that very day.

I ended up switching out a few of the fill in spots with beads. Since I really wanted to keep the look of the pencil coloured image, I did all of the black outline first, and then only filled in with one row of split stitch even when it didn’t fill the entire space between the outlines. Some of the petal shapes were filled with a rough satin stitch. I really love the effect and the mix of textures that the beads and different stitches lend to the piece.

Once my oval wooden hoops from 123stitch.com come in, I’ll definitely hoop this one up and put it up on the wall. It’s just too pretty and dainty.

When I first found this pattern of a large sailing ship, I wanted to appliqué the sails on.  That turned out to be a bit more difficult than I thought it would be; not because appliqué is too hard, but because non-blank pretty patterned fabric is hard to get for a girl who lives downtown, far away from the fabric stores of suburbia.  I could go raid my mother’s quilt fabric cupboard, but that is a bit rude.

So instead, I decided to treat it like a filling stitch sampler, using a different stitch per sail.  I poured over my slightly battered copy of The Anchor Book of Crewelwork Embroidery Stitches (Eve Harlow, 9780715306321), looking for both my favourites and a few weird stitches I had never tried before.  Here are the fun ones I used on the sails.

This is triangle buttonhole filling, which is done in the exact same way as a regular buttonhole stitch, but each set of four stitches starts at the same spot at the top of the triangle.  In order to keep it straight, I traced out horizontal lines with a ruler as I traced my design.

Square buttonhole is an adorable variant to a buttonhole stitch, which gives you an adorable grid.  The key to this one is to leave a gap between each set of four stitches that is the same width as those four stitches.  Then, when you do the second row, the top of the buttonhole stitch overlaps the gap that you left above.

Faggot stitch is meant to look like a bundle of wheat or sticks, held together in the middle by a rope.  Usually done in one colour, I decided to do the loops around the middle in a darker shade of blue just to add interest.  That meant doing all my vertical, parallel stitches first, changing threads and going under the threads, around once, and back down underneath the bundle that created.  Any more than one twist around was too thick for such small stitches.

Couched trellis is super simple but also looks super elegant.  Again, I traced out my grid as I was tracing my pattern so that my lines ended up more or less straight.  You need to do your large grid first, then you go back and tack down the intersections, couching them.  I did a tiny cross stitch over each intersection, first going vertically and then horizontally on all of them to keep the look super tidy and consistent.

The overlapping, non couched trellis must have a name, but I do not know it.  I basically did a first trellis pass, then went over the area again with a different colour, just next to the original trellis.  This effectively tacked the previous trellis down, although it is not as steady as the couched trellis is.

I first blogged about coral stitch back in September, although then it had beads.  I simply tried to follow the curve of the sail as I stitched.  I think this is my least favourite sail.

Thorn stitch is fabulous and airy, and I wish I had more reason to use it.  I love how organically the x stitches climb the long vertical one, and how easy is it for it to look amazing.  Or at least, how hard it is to screw up.

I wanted the last two sails to be a bit more full than others, since some like the faggot and thorn stitch ones were so airy.  This chain stitch sail has an excellent texture and looks much fuller than some of the others, which I love.

This final sail is filled with an open fishbone stitch.  I was thinking of doing it in herringbone stitch, but I couldn’t figure out how to get it working with the odd shape of the sail.  I knew I wanted threads that crossed, to mirror the thorn stitch a bit, and open fishbone fit the bill perfectly.

After doing all the sails, I simply took a dark navy thread and backstitched the rest of the boat.  For the waves, I used DMC Color Infusion Memory Thread, which I had never used before.  It is a thread wrapped coppery wire that has quite a bit of flexibility.  I played a bit with it and managed to get a super tight corckscrew.  I used an awl to make a largish hole in the fabric (without tearing it) to tuck the wire in at one end of my waves, then couched along the lines with a colour one shade lighter.  The wire allowed me to tweak my waves a bit after couching, which was interesting.  It also let me really decide what direction I wanted the wire to go before couching it.  I would twist it into shape and it would stay.  All in all, I can’t wait to find another project I can use this thread on.