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.