It’s been very interesting working on the two twill samples which Barbara at Tristan Brooks sent me last month. The final verdict? I like them both! But that’s not particularly helpful, is it?

So let’s look at them in a bit more detail. I described in an earlier post how the different twills took micron pen transfers differently; now to find out whether they take stitching in crewel wool differently too. First up was the Scottish oatmeal twill. It’s quite a heavy fabric compared to anything I’ve ever stitched on – Lizzie at Laurelin Embroidery described it to me as “a heavy cloth suitable for soft furnishings” and it definitely feels stiffer and a bit coarser than evenweave or plainweave linen. In order to minimize wear on the crewel wool (Appleton’s, which happened to be the only type in my stash) I used a size 22 chenille needle, which feels quite big but works well. The fabric has a nice close weave, closer than the Normandie, and it was easy to pierce it exactly where I wanted to, which makes for accurate stitching (well, as accurate as the stitcher…). I’m not sure I’d use this with silks or goldwork, but I do like it with wool; even using wool that I don’t particularly like!

You may ask why I’m stitching with wools I don’t much like. Good question. It’s because when I wanted to buy some crewel wools to experiment with, several years ago, Appleton’s was all I could find. It also comes in lots of colours, which is convenient, and it isn’t too expensive. But it suffers from varying thickness, getting quite worryingly thin sometimes, and it pills, bunching up when you come to the end of a thread. I have good hopes that the Pearsall’s wool I treated myself to the other day will be nicer to work with.

Back to the project for a moment, and to the non-fabric elements. The design is Kelly Fletcher’s Bloomin’ Marvellous 11, and I used stem stitch (the stem), padded satin stitch (the green bit under the flower), buttonhole stitch (light yellow), chain stitch (the petals), and finally, because the petals looked a bit empty, I added dark yellow lines of Palestrina stitch. I varied the distance between the knots to see which I liked best, but I think they’d all work depending on the effect you want.

The next project was Bloomin’ Marvellous 4. I’ll get the stitches out of the way first: stem stitch (the stem and the outline of the leaf), loop stitch (inside of the leaf), two shades of buttonhole stitch “slotted” into each other (green ring), French knots (yellow centre), chain stitch and lattice work. The chain stitch and the buttonhole stitch, by the way, show how varying in thickness the wool is.

As for the fabric, it’s Legacy Linen twill as used and recommended by Mary Corbet. It’s a much lighter fabric than the Scottish twill, both in weight and in colour. It also feels smoother and more pliable. But like the Scottish twill it is a close weave which makes it easy to place stitches exactly where they should go, and in spite of being lighter it has enough body to take the stitching well without distorting or puckering. (Both fabrics take unpicking well, too.) Because of its smoother, lighter look I can see myself using this with other threads besides wool, making it a bit more versatile than the Scottosh twill. But as I said at the beginning, I like them both and will hopefully use them both again.

Incidentally, have you heard of “twilling”? Nothing to do with twill, which is what I first thought, but a type of stitching used mainly by quilters, apparently. It consists of outlines stitched in Palestrina stitch, originally white on white or at least tone on tone (much like Hardanger), but now also worked in colour. As the outline stitch used is knotted I’m not sure it would work for very detailed pictorial designs, but perhaps a Celtic knot pattern or something similarly abstract? Mary Corbet does beautiful things with it on an ecclesiastical linen pouch, outlining a cross. Definitely a stitch to play with!