Do you find that you have certain favourite materials and stitches for the various types of embroidery? I’ve been doing quite a bit of goldwork recently (you may have noticed…) and certain metals and threads have been steadily emerging as favourites whereas others are on the avoid-if-possible list. The larger sizes of rococco, for example, definitely fall into the latter category (I much prefer the also wavy but finer check thread); and passing thread in its various weights is one I reach for with much more enthusiasm than Jap, with which it shares certain characteristics. It’s a shame that Jap and rococco are required in my Certificate piece, whereas check thread and passing are not allowed.

So what is passing, and how does it differ from Jap? Well, they both have a thread core (silk or cotton); the difference lies in what is wrapped around the outside. In Jap this is a relatively wide strip of metal foil paper, whereas in passing it is a metal wire or a thin strip of metal. This makes passing slightly stiffer, but also more suitable to take around sharp bends – Jap’s foil wrapping sometimes comes away from its thread core if the bend falls right in the middle of a wrap.

A few weeks ago someone on the Needle ‘n Thread Facebook Group mentioned a shop called Tied to History which, they said, had some great bargains on discontinued threads, among them fine passing. This sounded interesting! I had a quick look, and before long several shades of fine passing had made it into my shopping basket, including a lovely rose gold which you may remember I thought might work for adding wavy highlights to Mechtild’s hair. When they arrived, I was not disappointed – lovely fine threads, much finer than any of the passing I had in my stash.

In fact what it most resembled was an unidentified metal thread I was given by my mother-in-law a few years ago. And like that thread, it seemed to be a bit betwixt and between: relative to the thread’s thickness, the wraps around the core are much narrower than in Jap, but rather wider than in passing. When I asked the seller about this, she said that she wasn’t an embroiderer herself but a maker of historic costumes; she hadn’t been able to find a thin enough metallic in the US, so had begun to source them herself, and eventually found these in India. She said she might well not be using the correct technical term for them. Be that as it may, they are lovely fine threads, and I look forward to using them!

But to do that, I need to undo the skeins. I started with one of the silver ones, partly because I bought two of them so if something went wrong I’d still have the other skein. Call me a pessimist, but metallic threads can be unruly and challenging, as I knew only to well after tackling the Jap that came in the bundle of gold threads my mother-in-law passed on to me.

And yes, before too long I ended up with an almighty tangle. Sigh. I contacted the seller, who said yes, the threads could be challenging to store; she usually popped them around a jam jar and took off as much as she needed, straightening the thread as she went. I can’t quite visualise the jam jar, but over the Christmas period, when the light is rather too bad for any serious goldwork stitching, I hope to take a leisurely afternoon or so to create shiny order out of metallic chaos. Wish me luck!