Customer feedback and some bead experiments

Posted on March 19, 2013 by Flights of Fancy

Have you ever written something – a letter, an essay, a report – and gone over it several times, then sent it off only to be told by the recipient that there was a paragraph missing, or that a date was incorrect, or that the wrong picture had been used to illustrate a point? I hope there are at least a few of you out there who have to say “yes” to that; let’s just say that if to err is human, there is no doubting my humanity!

But what a difference it makes how those errors are brought to your attention. Some people delight in pointing out to others exactly where they went wrong, and some accompany it with a condescending, mock-pitying smile. Not so fellow-stitchers. In the kindest tones and without the slightest resentment they inform me that the stitched model does not have all the cutting done (Vienna), that some cutting in the design is not actually mentioned in the instructions (Schwarzwälder Kirsch), or that the light grey in the chart is practically invisible when printed, and obscured by the watermark (Resurrection); and because of that, I can rectify these things. And when I rewrite chart packs (adding instructions for double-sided Kloster blocks, for example) they give me their feedback so that I know whether these new instructions are clear enough. I hope I never forget to thank you personally when you help me improve my designs, but here is a public and communal Thank You to everyone who has sent me feedback over the past two years.

Of course it’s even better to get the wrinkles ironed out before a chart pack goes “live”. That’s one of the reasons why I stitch every design before writing the instructions – especially important when a chart contains new stitches or new variations on stitches which so far exist only in my head and on paper. Will they work in fabric and thread? In real life, will they look like my mental picture of them? Well, sometimes they do, which is a wonderful feeling. When I first tried out the beaded diagonals and beaded woven bars I had scribbled down on a scrap of paper in the middle of the night and they actually looked like I expected them to look, it was really quite thrilling! They became the starting point for Beadazzled, a sampler-type design which will include as many beaded stitches as I can think of (they were also used in Coral Cross, for which they were just right).

And so in between stitching other things I am trying out all sorts of ways to combine threads and beads. Some of them sound good when I describe them to myself, but turn out to be impossible to stitch. Some look a bit of a mess, and I can’t quite work out whether that’s a fatal flaw in the stitch itself, or the fact that I’m using cheap, unbranded and incredibly uneven beads for my experimenting (definitely a false economy, that). Some work exactly the way they should (yay!) and get included in the design. And some are simply a lost cause. Creating a woven picot with a beaded edge seemed like a good idea – challenging and decorative. It was challenging all right. It was also a complete failure which looked like a misshapen Christmas tree …

But don’t worry, I found a different way of incorporating beads in a woven picot!

A silly mistake, pretty threads and a new idea

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Flights of Fancy

Last Sunday I was sitting with an elderly friend so his daughter and wife could both go to church for Mothering Sunday, and I’d taken Happy Hour 1 with me to stitch. Of the four designs in the set, it is definitely my favourite, and it is the one that uses the threads which inspired the set, those lovely Australian Cottage Garden perles. I’d picked an opalescent 28ct Lugana to work the model on, and as we were chatting I settled down to some serious stitching. #12 satin stitch centre in Oregano green, #8 satin stitch, almost Florentine, around it in Dahlia pink. Looking good! Leaf stitch in Oregano, and then on to some triple chain stitch. I’m sure I must have seen something like it somewhere, but I couldn’t find it in any of my stitch dictionaries, so I did my own stitch diagram, and wrote the instructions. It’s basically like a detached chain stitch (also known as a lazy daisy), but instead of only one loop of thread held down with a little securing stitch, I wanted to have three loops.

I had drawn a detailed diagram. I had written a description of every step. And yet it wasn’t until I actually tried to work the stitch that I realised its fatal flaw: I would have to come up in the hole that I’d just gone down in, not once, but twice. And I hadn’t noticed!

I decided to work the plain chain stitch border instead, and re-chart the triple chain stitch when I got home. Having considered two possible solutions to the problem, I eventually settled on a small anchoring stitch, and all three loops going underneath it but all starting in separate holes. The other solution, by the way, was to start all three loops in the same hole, and to anchor each one with its own little securing stitch, which would form a line together. Either way there are three different-sized loops siting inside each other, a very pleasing effect though not what I had in mind originally. You’ll be able to see what you think about the stitch when Happy Hour goes live.

And when will that be? Possibly sooner than I had originally thought – I’m enjoying them so much that they are my main project for the moment. Having finished three of the four there was a slight wait because I didn’t have the Threadworx perles needed for the last one, but they arrived this morning from trusty old Sew & So which means it’ll probably get finished tonight after choir practice! There is more #5 than #8 in this design and so it’s a bit of a shame that the lavendery #5 is not nearly so variegated as the #8, but I was pleased with how well it went with the green; it’s always a bit of a gamble, matching colours based on what you see on a computer screen!

And finally, the new idea. As I was writing the church newsletter and looking at illustrations for the Easter services I came across one I did some time ago, which said “Christ is risen. He is risen indeed!” in various languages. One of them was Old English, the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons, and I was thinking it would make rather a nice Easter project to have those Old English words surrounded by a knotwork border or something of the sort. There is no way I’m going to get anything like that charted by the end of this month, however, so watch this space when we’re getting into Lent 2014

Working on the SAL

Posted on October 22, 2012 by Flights of Fancy

November is getting nearer, and so I’m starting to get just a little bit twitchy. The whole SAL has been charted and half has been stitched, but that still leaves 6 projects to finish with only 10 days to go until the Materials List is due. Oh well, nothing like a challenge.

It still surprises me how you can completely miss things about charts you’ve drawn yourself until you actually stitch them. So far I have corrected missing bars, elements that aren’t quite lined up, and Kloster blocks with the stitches going in the wrong direction.

And of course there are the usual things which crop up whenever I work a stitched model – in one design I stitched part of the border only to find that I really disliked the way it looked. So one of the two speciality stitches in it was ruthlessly cast aside, and the border now consists of two off-set rows of the other speciality stitch.

Then I realised that two types of bar which I thought were part of the SAL had in fact not got into in any of the designs. Some quick recharting was called for, which took a bit of doing as I didn’t really want to start making changes to any of the months that I had already stitched!

While stitching one of the models I started wondering whether it would be possible to incorporate beads in bars, but instead of being sensible and experimenting on a scrap of spare fabric I just tried it out in the model I was working on. It didn’t work. Unpicking beads from bars is not easy … Even so I’m not giving up the idea entirely; I still think it may work with a different type of bar. Watch this space.

Quite a few things may still change in the designs for July to December, but as they stand now the whole series will contain (besides Kloster blocks and other typical Hardanger satin stitch elements) six types of bars, 11 filling stitches, three different ways of using beads, one ribbon stitch and 26 or so speciality stitches. I hope you will enjoy them!

Ways of starting (II)

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Flights of Fancy

In my last post I looked at the waste knot and the away knot as a method of fastening on your working thread. Here are two more methods, or to be precise two methods plus a variation. The first one I’m sure you’re all familiar with; it’s the one I’ve been using ever since I started doing cross stitch and I’m not even sure it’s got a name. I call it the Tail method because you start by bringing the needle up through the fabric, leaving a tail at the back of the fabric (picture 1). Then start stitching, making sure you over the tail as you go (pictures 2 & 3). All three pictures show the back of the work.

A great favourite of mine, and a great one to keep your back tidy, is the loop start. It only works when working with an even number of threads or strands, unfortunately, but when it works it’s very neat. It can be worked in two ways, one of which is even cleverer than the other! Both start by doubling your strand or strands and threading the needle with the cut ends (picture 1, below). The difference is whether the loop is left at the front or the back of the fabric. If you leave it at the back (that is to say, you bring the needle up for the first stitch as usual) you need to turn your work over to catch the loop. With the "front loop" method everything happens at the front of your work.

To begin, take the needle down the fabric at the beginning of your stitch, where you would normally bring the needle up. Don’t pull it all the way through but leave a loop at the front of the fabric. Then bring the needle up at the other end of the stitch (picture 2). Take the needle through the loop (picture 3) and pull the thread right through (picture 4). Take the needle down the same hole in which you came up, making sure you catch the loop (picture 5). Pull the thread right through, so that the loop gets pulled to the back of the fabric. Voilà, one anchored stitch (picture 6).

I suddenly realised there is another method which I use quite often but haven’t mentioned yet – and I haven’t got pictures of it either, but I hope a verbal description will be clear enough. This method only works if you’ve already done some stitching, and I tend to use it in Hardanger to fasten on the perle #8 for the bars and filling stitches after I’ve worked the Kloster blocks. At the back of the work I take the needle behind one or two Kloster blocks, ending up near where I want to start stitching; then I loop the thread round the last of the stitches that I’ve passed under. This anchors it very effectively.

If I’ve missed any really efficient ways of fastening on, do let me know – I always like to learn new methods!

Ways of starting (I)

Posted on October 6, 2012 by Flights of Fancy

As I was stitching one of the Guildhouse course models (the silk sampler) I got distracted into thinking about ways of starting a thread. Most instructions I have read over the years tend to say breezily "fasten on your thread" before moving swiftly on to the much more interesting matter of how to work the design or stitch. I will admit to doing so myself in Mabel’s chart packs, although in a good number of the stitch diagrams I do add something like "fasten on behind a Kloster block", and the diagram will show where; and of course in the Beginners’ Kits I specifically describe how and where to fasten on. But generally speaking, it is left to the stitcher to decide what method she or he will use.

And there are quite a few methods on offer, some with variations. You probably know several of them already, but I thought it might be helpful to have them all described. I’ve even produced some pictures! In fact I’ve produced rather a lot of pictures, so I’ll show the Waste Knot and the Away Knot today, and the Tail start and Loop start in the next post

The Waste and Away Knot methods are really two variations on a theme: both involve a knot that sits at the front of your work for a bit and is then snipped off and discarded. Several sites refer to the Away Knot as the Away Waste Knot, showing that they regard it as a type of waste knot. So what is the difference?

Let’s start with the waste knot. This is particularly useful if you are going to work a number of stitches in one direction. Tie a knot in the end of your thread and take the needle down the fabric a little way away from where you will start stitching (picture 1), making sure that you will be stitching in the direction of the knot. Work your stitches (picture 2 – I’m doing some fairly raggedy satin stitch). Picture 3 shows the back of the work, covering the thread. When you reach the knot, pull it up a little and snip it off. The cut end will disappear into the fabric, and you can continue stitching.

But what it you’re stitching a few random French knots, or a stitch where there is very little thread at the back of the work so you would have to keep turning over your work to check that you are actually covering and anchoring the thread? Well, you could try an away knot. It starts in the same way, with a knot at the end of your thread – but this time you take the needle down about 4"/10cm away from where you will start stitching, and in the opposite direction to where you will be going (picture 1). Start stitching; I worked a number of French knots. At the back of the work you can see where I travelled from French knot to French knot, and you can also see the thread stretching to my away knot (picture 2). Now snip the knot at the front of the fabric, turn the work over and thread the needle with the loose end. Take the needle under some of the stitches to secure the thread (picture 3).

One note of caution about the away knot – it is very easy to underestimate the length of thread you will need to be able to comfortably secure it later, and few things are more exasperating than threading a cut end that turns out to be too short to work with. 4" is really about as little as you can get away with! This does make it probably the most wasteful method of fastening on, and so it is unlikely to become anyone’s default method, but it’s a useful one to have in your repertoire.

Literary embroidery

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Flights of Fancy

Earlier this week we were visiting friends in Chawton. If you are at all fond of early 19th-century literature, that may make you prick up your ears, because once upon a time Jane Austen lived in Chawton, and the house is now a museum. I studied English a couple of decades ago and although I am by no stretch of the imagination a "Janeite" I do enjoy her novels very much, so whenever we visit our friends I’ve been meaning to visit the house. And this time, it finally happened.

It’s definitely worth a visit, with many period items and even some interactive displays; I had a go at writing with a quill pen and oak gall ink (and have the stained fingers to prove it), and the Austen-themed Snakes & Ladders in the garden was rather fun. But for me as a stitcher the nice thing was that there were several bits of embroidery in the collection, as well as two gorgeous dresses, one of which I was allowed to touch to inspect the inside – it had raised dots on the outside which I had always assumed (when I’d seen this sort of decoration in pictures) were French knots or something like it, but in fact they are tiny tufts of thread, cut very short, and as far as I could see not held in by any sort of anchoring. We live and learn; I’d have thought the decoration might work loose in the wash or even during everyday activities, but then the ladies wearing it would not be engaging in vigorous exercise, and their delicate muslins would be cleaned most carefully. Perhaps it’ll teach me to be less worried about washing my stitching!

The most interesting things were pieces of stitching worked by Jane Austen herself, or relatives (sister, nieces); suddenly she is not just a much-admired author, but a fellow stitcher. There were some flowers in needle painting embroidery, and a lovely bit of lace – well, the card said it was lace, but it looked more like a sheer fabric applied to netting and then cut away. However it was done (and I seem to remember seeing this technique in a book some time ago) it looks lovely and delicate.

I knew that the late Victorians were mad about perforated paper (they used it for cards, bookmarks, needlebook covers and just about everything else) but I hadn’t realised it had been around before that. If Wikipedia is correct in saying that the material was first available in 1820, Jane Austen won’t have made this little workbox herself but it could well have been created by one of her nieces.

The item that really caught my eye, however, was a little purse or bag. It was worked entirely in Hardanger! Well, something uncannily like it, anyway. From what I could see (and it’s not easy to study needlework in detail when it is shut away in a glass display case) a very large square was bordered and then cut, and the entire thing finished with woven bars in two colours. If Frozen Flower is anything to go by, it must have taken forever!

Not at Jane Austen’s but at our friends’ house I found another interesting bit of embroidery, which was being used as a laptop cover. I forgot to ask where it came from, but it strikes me as South American. It shows a stylised bird (a cockerel perhaps?) and is worked free-hand in a variety of stitches including chain, straight, herringbone and stem. It’s such a cheerful piece with its bold lines and colours, and made me realise once again what a very effective stitch chain stitch is. I was going to use it in the class on Shisha embroidery anyway, but don’t be surprised if it pops up a bit more often in future.

Too many stitches!

Posted on September 6, 2012 by Flights of Fancy

When asked what he thought of Mozart’s latest opera, Le Nozze di Figaro, Emperor Joseph II famously said that it had "too many notes". I am tempted to echo him (albeit inaccurately) as I’m trying to finalise the designs for the Song of the Weather SAL, and sigh exasperatedly: "too many stitches!"

I’m trying to include all the usual stitches (dove’s eye, square filet, woven bar) because it is meant in part for people who want to get into Hardanger. But from the start it has also been my intention to have plenty of other stitches for those who have done quite a bit of stitching and would like to learn something new. And so I’ve been going over my stitch repertoire, and tried combining stitches to see if that produced anything usable, and looked through lots of embroidery books hunting out stitches I hadn’t tried before – and it is incredible how many stitches there are out there! How do you choose?

It doesn’t help that many stitches go by different names in different parts of the world or at different times or even in the same part of the world at the same time; Queen’s stitch and Rococo stitch are one and the same thing, and so are lazy daisy and detached chain stitch. Holbein stitch is an alternative name for double running stitch. Bargello and Florentine work are pretty much the same thing (apologies if I have overlooked a subtle difference). Occasionally there are names that cover more than one stitch; one of my books called something Rhodes stitch which isn’t anything like the Rhodes stitch I know, and Smyrna stitch can be either a double cross stitch, or a type of knotted stitch.

And then there are the stitches which are treated as separate types, when they are really very much alike. A clear example is blanket stitch and buttonhole stitch – exactly the same technique, but one is stitched closer together than the other. Feather stitch and Cretan stitch can be described in the same way ("bring the needle up at A, go down at B a little way away from A leaving a loop; come up again at C somewhere between the two, catching the loop"); the main difference is really whether C is only a little lower than A and B, or very noticeably lower. Fly stitch is pretty much a single feather stitch. And angled blanket stitch is feather stitch going in one direction instead of zigzagging.

But even when you discard all the stitches which are identical except for the name, and weed out the stitches that are very similar indeed, there is still an overwhelming variety available. And I’ve only got 12 relatively small projects to put them all in! My desk is covered in stitch diagrams and lists of stitches, some of them resolutely crossed out, others scribbled in as a late addition. In an effort to seem organised I’ve divided them into five groups: filling stitches, bar stitches, filling stitches which include bars, surface stitches, and border stitches. Now all I need to do is whittle the 60 or so stitches down to a manageable number. It’s time to get tough!

P.S. A useful resource for information about a large number of stitches is the Arts & Design glossary. For stitch instruction videos you can’t beat Mary Corbet’s blog; and check out her Stitch Play section for some great ideas.

An exercise in patience

Posted on August 27, 2012 by Flights of Fancy

Did I say last time that I enjoyed designing? I must have been out of my tiny little mind!

No, it’s not that bad really – but sometimes it can be quite frustrating. I’ve just finished Gingham Gems (I), and am now stitching (no surprises there) the two designs of Gingham Gems (II). Kloster blocks in two shades of beige, fine, some surface stitches inside the Kloster block pattern, fine, fan stitches in the four corners, not fine.

I’d charted these corner fans as partial ribbed spiderwebs. The complete version has a number of spokes (usually, though not always, eight), and the thread is taken round the circle, encircling the spokes as you weave so that you end up with very pronounced "ribs". Surely, if you do a quarter of a circle, you end up with a ribbed fan? It turned out not to be quite so simple.

For one thing, the two spokes at the outside of the fan can’t be ribbed. It’s simply not possible, unless you take the thread down the fabric every time you get to the outside spokes, which I didn’t want to do. It also turned out to be extremely difficult to make the ribs nice and even. I finished one fan, decided I didn’t like the look of it at all, and unpicked it. I then tried weaving the fan, simply going over and under the spokes. This looked a lot neater, but also very very solid, and far too heavy for the rest of the design. Hoping to save something from the wreckage, and bouncing several ideas off my ever helpful husband, I tried partially filling the fan, then filling it in a staggered pattern, but neither looked at all attractive. I unpicked the whole thing, and also the spokes in the other three corners.

Now what? I was still rather keen on the fan shape, because it fits the corners so nicely. What about herringbone ladder stitch? That has rather a nice braided appearance, and although it is usually stitched straight between two parallel lines there is no reason why you shouldn’t have the stitches squashed together at one end and fanned out at the other. I tried one corner.

Oh well. Better than the solid woven fan and the irregular ribbed fan, but not quite what I had in mind. I think the bottom end needs to be narrower. So the next attempt will have a single backstitch for the bottom (instead of three arranged in a curve, as here), and all the herringbone stitches will cluster together in it. I’ll let you know if that’s any better – but don’t be surprised if Gingham Gems (II) eventually goes live with a completely different corner stitch!

Playing with stitches (II)

Posted on July 17, 2012 by Flights of Fancy

Sometimes you find a stitch with a great texture or shape but which is rather laborious, or complicated, or looks as if it could be done in a much simpler way. When you come across a stitch like that, do you shrug your shoulders and think "Oh well, if that’s how it’s done, that’s how I’ll have to do it"? Do you decide it’s too much effort doing it the correct way so you end up not using it?

If you’re anything like me, you say to yourself "Whose embroidery is it anyway? I’ll go all Frank Sinatra and do it my way!" Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. If it works, wonderful! You have just invented an easier way of creating a beautiful stitch. If it doesn’t, no harm done, you simply go back to doing it the original way.

One of the stitches where it did work is the needleweaving in Odessa. Following the original instructions meant fastening on and off for each of the 6 journeys it would take to fill the cut area. And there are 8 needleweaving areas in the design … But it was not just that this method was very fiddly; you also end up with a lot of thread tails that have to be secured somewhere, and the first and last group of threads covered by the needleweaving become much thicker (and untidier) than the others.

So I devised a way in which it was possible to fasten on once, and then keep going back and forth. It meant I had to fasten off and on only once in between beginning and ending each needleweaving area, when I ran out of thread. Much easier, and much tidier!

But sometimes it doesn’t work. In a book of stitches my mother-in-law gave me some time ago there is one called Portuguese border stitch. It is very textural, and involves stitching a "ladder" of straight stitches as its base, after which you take the thread round those base stitches rather than through the fabric. It takes three journeys: the "ladder", one side all along its length, and the other side all along its length. If the length of your border is more than a few centimetres, you will have to fasten off and on between journeys two and three.

Surely there must be an easier way of doing this? What if I just work the stitches from journeys two and three in the ordinary way – no base stitches, just the same shape stitched directly on to the fabric?

It’s not a bad shape, is it? Quite pleasant and decorative, and very easy to do. And yet I won’t be stitching it like this. Because if you work it the traditional way, it looks like this:

And doesn’t that just look much better?

Playing with stitches

Posted on June 26, 2012 by Flights of Fancy

As I was going through my notes for the Song of the Weather SAL, looking at the lists of possible stitches to include, I thought it might be rather fun to include some Shisha glass. I picked some up in the tiny needlework section of a shop somewhere in Yorkshire some time ago, and hadn’t done much with it yet. Now Shisha stitch is usually worked on non-count fabric, so if I was to add it to the SAL I’d have to see if I could chart it for counted fabric. The first step was to work out how many fabric threads the little mirror would cover, how far apart the base stitches should be, and whether I could work a regular circle around the glass using stitches of roughly equal length.

It turns out the base stitches need to be much closer together than you would expect! They are pulled towards the edge of the glass by the later stitches, which are a sort of twiddly buttonhole variation, and I actually had to re-do the base stitches twice before I got them right. Then I started wondering – would it be possible to have the Shisha stitch without the glass? You’d have to create a sort of "inner circle" or more likely an octagon of straight stitches, and work into those. Well, I tried, and it’s possible, but it looks a bit flat. There’s definitely a good reason for having the glass inside the Shisha stitch!

Finally I thought I’d try Shisha stitch in a straight line; make a sort of braid. A base of backstitch, more buttonhole twiddles and voilà, Shisha braid. I like the look of this one, and it’s definitely staying in my repertoire of stitches.

In case you think I’ve given away part of the mystery in the Mystery SAL, don’t worry – I decided that adding Shisha glass would add another complication to the materials list (not to mention having to chart different versions for different counts of fabric), and I didn’t need another "band" stitch so the Shisha braid has been stored for some future design. I did think up another stitch, though, or rather a combination of two familiar stitches, which may very well make it into the final SAL design – so that one is staying a secret for the moment …

Flights of Fancy

Mabel's musings on anything stitchy

Category Archives: Stitches