To Bayeux or not to Bayeux, that is the question

Posted on 21st March, 2022 by Flights of Fancy

There is a lot of Bayeux stitch in my life at the moment, which is at least partly because my enthusiasm for different techniques tends to come in waves. I usually have quite a few projects on the go of various types, but every now and then one technique captures my imagination and I’ll want to stitch lots of designs in that technique, whether other people’s or my own. In the past year I’ve read a lot about the Bayeux tapestry which piqued my interest in the style, and so when Bartram the Bayeux Ram came along he was a great way of having a play with the stitch. Being able to do so with a friend was even better, and we have now both finished him – we’re very pleased with our flock of two!

When we next get together we’ll lace the two Bartrams over foam board ready for display. By the way, I finished mine at the very first Cake & Craft held in our new church building. As the name implies it’s just people getting together to do some craft and eat cake, and we had a lovely time. One lady had brought her sugar work, another a small weaving project, and there was also plenty of knitting, crochet and stitching. As the one organising it (and therefore in charge of making the teas and coffees and cutting and handing round the cake) I didn’t get a lot done myself, but I did manage Bartram’s final curl.

Another Bayeux presence in the Figworthy household came about because of my intention to rectify the inexplicable absence of Austin Sevens on the tapestry, in honour of the little car’s centenary this year. For the first model, a Chummy like the one Mr F and I went on our honeymoon in, I chose the wrong fabric. It was a lovely linen but the weave was too open, and although it looked just about OK it was difficult to stitch accurately. Not one to persist with non-enjoyable stitching I abandoned it.

Quite apart from the bad choice of fabric, it also took too long – remember, this was meant to be a quick stitch project to offer as an activity for the non-car-enthusiast partners during the week of Centenary celebrations. So I tried one of the other models in a smaller size, and for the moment without the accompanying text (as it takes a lot of time, and is probably only funny to those who know a bit about the tapestry anyway). At my first go I managed to misread my own colour plan and made the blue stitches too short. Sigh. Unpick, restitch. For the wheels I studied the tapestry again. Surprisingly, I could only find one cart, but that did show me that the wheels were worked in eight parts of straight stitches. They look suitably wonky for a hundred-year-old car, but the whole thing still takes too long.

Even so, I was not yet ready to give up on some Austin-Seven-themed stitching at the Centenary. Outline only then? In that case the wording would definitely have to go, as it wouldn’t be in the style of the Bayeux tapestry any more. A shame, but heigh ho, if that’s what it takes to make it doable, that’s what I’ll do. And it turns out that an outlined Austin Seven (a 1937 Ruby, in this case) looks quite attractive! But it still takes too long…

I had to admit defeat. Still, I was enjoying these little projects, and as I had already transferred both the sporting Nippy and another Chummy, I thought I might as well stitch them – the Nippy in a primrose yellow typical for that model, and the Chummy in turqoise, the closest I could get from stash to the colour of our honeymoon car. The latter is still in progress, and I had to decide what to do with the lettering as the black Appleton’s I have is so thick and rough (see the roof of the Box Saloon – and I actually went over that with fine scissors to remove the worst of the sticky-out fluff) that I haven’t a hope of producing legible writing in it. Stranded cotton would work, but has too much shine compared to the wool. However, you may remember that I acquired a whole set of unmercerised, matt flower threads recently, and among them there is a black which looks just about the right thickness; I’ll let you know how I get on!

So is the Chummy the end of my Bayeux binge? You won’t be surprised to hear that it isn’t, but my next project could have been a bit embarrassing if I’d been any slower in designing it. You see, I’m working on some projects for a 6-week course I’m planning, the first three weeks of which will revolve around crewel embroidery. In those three classes I want to introduce Bayeux-style embroidery, Jacobean, and modern crewel, and for the Bayeux class my inspiration came from some of the intriguing creatures in the margins of the tapestry. There are dogs, birds, fish, mythical creatures, and what must be a camel designed by someone who’d heard about camels but had never actually seen one.

After some deliberation, and briefly considering some smiling horses’ heads sticking out of the boats in one of the scenes, I settled on a pair of peacocks, and of the pair particularly on the rather chunky one with the circular tail (who Mr F says looks like a dodo).

You will understand my dismay when, on a visit to Tanya Bentham’s blog, I found a video of her stitching the other peacock, with a comment that it was a companion to the circular peacock which was in her latest book – the book I actually had on pre-order! Fortunately I hadn’t received it yet, and therefore hadn’t seen what her treatment of the peacock was; I decided not to read the book until I had completely decided what my peacock would look like, and I heaved a sigh of relief when I did read the book and saw that our interpretation of his tail in particular and of some other parts as well was quite different. Phew. Now I just need to stitch mine , and to do it I’ve ordered some Renaissance Dyeing crewel wool. You see, I would like the students to be able to work with some nicer wool than Appleton’s on at least one project, but my favourite Heathway Milano is rather too expensive if I want to keep the course kits a reasonable price; the Renaissance Dyeing wool works out at about a third of the price per metre. I haven’t quite decided which of these colours I’m going to use – I want to keep the palette fairly limited, as in the original – but I’ll have fun experimenting on the two sizes of peacock I’ve transferred!

PS: A Century of Sevens is now available as a chart pack

A Bayeux Box

Posted on 1st March, 2022 by Flights of Fancy

2022 is the 150th anniversary of the Royal School of Needlework, but much more importantly (as Mr F would say) it is also the Centenary of the Austin Seven, one of which you can see in the picture below, taken on the Figworthy honeymoon. There will be a whole week of festivities in the summer, with runs through beautiful countryside and so on, but a lot of it will also involve owners of Austin Sevens admiring each other’s Austin Sevens and talking about, er, Austin Sevens. What, I wanted to know, is planned for the non-Austin-Seven-mad spouse/significant other (who is usually, though by no means always, the wife/girlfriend) and any offspring?

As just one possible activity, could I perhaps set up a little stitching corner? A table with some chairs, a pile of fabrics and threads and hoops and they could come and sit down for a bit and stitch. Ah, he said, but they’re trying to keep everything on site Austin Seven related. And then inspiration struck. I’m hoping to teach another course at Rugby’s Percival Guildhouse later this year, which would include a few classes on crewel or wool embroidery. And as I worked with great enjoyment on Bartram the Bayeux Ram, I’d been thinking of including one class on a Bayeux-themed project. For that reason I’d been studying the excellent online version of the tapestry made available by the Bayeux Museum, looking among other things at some of the horses. And what is a car, after all, but a mechanised horse? The Bayeux Austin Seven was born.

Well, conceived anyway. What I needed was a simplified outline that could be filled in with fairly large chunks of Bayeux stitch (which is a lot quicker than, say, cross stitch – a good thing as people are unlikely to want to sit and stitch for hours). And although I mentioned “Box” in the title because I like a bit of alliteration, actually my first idea was for a Chummy, like the 1925 one we went on our honeymoon in. I drew one with the hood down, and one with the hood up.

However, in order to cater for all (or nearly all) comers, I did indeed include our Box Saloon (1933), and as for a short while we looked after a 1936 Ruby, that too went in the line-up. Then I didn’t want the sporting owners (or rather, their stitching partners) to feel left out, so a Nippy completed the collection.

As usual when designing I got a bit carried away at this point, and decided that what it really needed was lettering like on the Bayeux tapestry. The captions there tend to say things like “hic Harold mare navigavit” (which roughly translates as “here Harold sailed the sea”), so what I wanted was something in this vein, but Austin Seven themed. I thought of “here Sir Herbert / wrought the Seven”, then decided it would look more authentic (in as far as a Bayeux Austin Seven can be said to be authentic in any way) in Latin, and eventually settled on “hic Herbert Dom. / Austin 7 fingit”. “Dom” is short for Dominus, which is Lord rather than Sir but is the closest I could get, and at the last moment I changed the figure 7 to Roman numerals. I like the look of it, but it’s probably a good idea to make the lettering optional…

Finally it was time to add some digital colour, to give me an idea of what I was aiming for. I went for fairly authentic colours, but the actual stitched versions will depend on a) whatever I’ve got in my stash of non-Milano crewel wools and b) what people want their embroidered Austin to look like; after all, if their spouse’s Austin is a non-authentic shocking pink, who am I to object to them recreating it in wool?

After all, how accurate do these needlework cars need to be? In order to emulate the Bayeux tapestry, not very (judging by that ram I showed you a while ago). As long as they are recognisable by the afficionados I’m happy. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves – I need to get stitching!

Bartram is de-horned

Posted on 18th February, 2022 by Flights of Fancy

A couple of weeks ago at Embroidery Group I got on with Bartram the Bayeux Ram’s horn. This is quite a tricky part, because it involves long straight stitches somehow going round a very curved horn. I’d drawn some guidelines on the transfer to have by me when stitching, as well as the photograph of the designer’s stitched model, but when I got home I wasn’t happy with it. Because there will be long couching stitches over these yellow stitches, they need to be at an angle to the ones that will overlay them, and I just wasn’t changing the angle quickly enough.

In Tanya Bentham’s model the stitches from the forehead into the first part of the horn don’t change direction, so mine could stay as well. But there was no saving the rest of it – the curved part of the horn would have to go. So out came the scissors once more, and a few snips and tugs later I had a clean playing field again. (By the way, as you can see from the pictures I decided to keep his bright red chest after all; I rather like the startling effect of it.)

When I photographed the re-stitched version and compared it to the old one, I realised it wasn’t nearly so different as I thought it was while stitching, but there is a slight improvement in the angle. It will have to do as I’m not unpicking it again!

Before moving on to couching and outlining the horn, it was time to couch his fleece. This is done in woolly white (ivory in my case, brighter white for my friend), and the couching stitches are long – they cover the full length of his body. Normally when doing Bayeux stitch I would work all the long couching stitches first and then go back and do all the tiny couching stitches that hold down the long couching stitches. Here, however, I felt they would be rather too vulnerable to being pulled and moved, so I decided to couch each long stitch down before moving to the next one. That might also make it easier to keep the long lines parallel to each other.

That was tricky enough with them being much longer than anything I’d tried before, but then there is the spacing of the small couching stitches. I try to keep them equidistant, and brick them from one line to the next. On my Jacobean certificate piece I actually measured the distance between each pair of stitches, but I felt that would be overkill on what is meant to be just a fun piece, so I eyeballed it. There was a certain amount of unpicking and restitching even so… Still, looking at the back I think I got them fairly equally spaced! (It also shows how little thread is at the back of the work when using Bayeux stitch.)

Mind you, judging by this ram (if it is a ram – I think so, judging by his curly horn) on the Bayeux Tapestry, perhaps I’m being a leetle but too fussy about the spacing of the lines and the placement of my couching stitches…

Meanwhile Sheep-Mad Friend has also been powering ahead, ably supported by her new table clamp (all right, I talked her into one of those ). Bartram the Bright is coming on beautifully, and at our next stitchy get-together we hope to give him his horizontal stripes!

Baa-yeux Bartram

Posted on 1st February, 2022 by Flights of Fancy

Awful pun by kind permission of Mr Figworthy. Yes, Bartram is back – in fact two Bartrams are back! Because last Friday my sheep-mad friend came over for a stitching session and made a start on hers. I’d had a brief go at mine earlier in the week at my Embroidery Group, and managed his legs (minus blue split stitch outline) and the start of his purple backside (because I’d forgotten that the red wool for his chest, which I had meant to start with, was still in my Hengest box).

At first I wasn’t going to add the green hillocks, as they are not in the transfer pattern; they are, however, in Tanya Bentham’s stitched model and I rather liked the look of them. On the grounds that even the Bayeux Tapestry has some stem stitch in it, we decided to work them in that, in two blended greens. Then Trina said that the position of his head suggested he was about to eat something, so we added some blades of grass in straight stitch for him to munch.

By the way, in the original version the fleece stripes (seven instead of six) are very distinct – one ends, the other begins. I decided to use a bit of shading, not so much to blend everything together (the colours are too different for that) but just as an interesting transition. I like the effect!

Now I can’t get it to show up clearly in the photographs, but in real life that purple is very dark. Too dark. I contemplated taking it out, but decided to wait until the red was in to see whether it really needed changing; it was going to be a fiddly job, so I didn’t want to do it if I didn’t have to. But alas, it was necessary. With all the other fleece colours, where they shade into each other the transitional stripes are quite noticeable, whereas between the purple and the blue it was almost invisible. Normally an invisible transition is exactly what you want, but in this case I wanted the stripes! It was time for a bottomectomy.

The cutting looks a bit brutal, but it was the easiest way of getting the purple out, and it meant I couldn’t shilly-shally and change my mind half way through. I had to be careful though, because if at all possible I wanted to leave the blue in place and stitch the new purple in between. Fortunately that worked, and the lighter purple shows up the transition with the blue much better as I hoped it would, so I’m pleased I took the plunge and changed it.

Only now the red looks too dark…

Finishing off a robin

Posted on 29th December, 2021 by Flights of Fancy

I am itching to start on the rainbow sheep, but the robin was to be completed first, for no other reason than that I had told myself it should and it would feel rather weak-willed to give in to ovine temptation, however colourful. So over the weekend I got to work, completed the shaded herringbone wing (also good practice for my Canvaswork module, as I hope to use the stitch there), and outlined the breast in medium red (left/top) and dark red (right/bottom) stem stitch.

But what to do about the wing outline? I was hoping to find something feathery but inspiration failed to strike so in the end I just went with shaded stem stitch. Then on to the head. There I did want something feathery, and I decided to use fly stitch in one strand.

Now in my original version of the robin the head is entirely worked in brown. This works fine as a stylised outline, even though in real life the red of a robin’s breast extends into its head. But as this version is “coloured in” (even though it is still very stylised), I felt I ought to have some red going up the throat, which is why the light brown fly stitches only surround about two thirds of the eye. However, before thinking about how to get the red to flow reasonably naturally from the battlement couching, first I had to do the feathers. It wasn’t easy to get them to lie in the right direction, and in fact I ended up with a rather ruffled robin, but on the whole I was happy with the effect.

Especially when I added in the other two shades of brown, and got the one-strand fly stitch head to blend into the two-strand herringbone wing. For the throat I went with straight stitches in blended light and medum red, with tiny seed stitches in one strand of dark red on top. The legs were done in black stem stitch, the beak in black straight stitch, and the eye in black Rhodes stitch. Finished, right?

But the eye didn’t look quite right. Nice and beady, and the Rhodes stitch gives it a bit of extra beadiness by being domed, but even so it needed a little something extra.

That little something extra was a stem stitch outline in one strand of light beige (fortunately I decided against my first choice of bright white), and now he is finished. On to the sheep! (among one or two other things…)

Experimenting on robins and ladybirds

Posted on 20th December, 2021 by Flights of Fancy

No no, there’s no need to call the RSPB and the RSPCA – only fabric was hurt in these experiments, by being repeatedly stabbed with a needle. In the case of the robin, I was trying out a herringbone variation which I found when researching stitches for the Canvaswork module. I put in a few rather faint guidelines and worked the first row; as the rows intertwine, my idea was to change the colour gradually from 2 strands of dark through one dark with one medium to two medium and so on. But just as had been the case when sampling this on canvas, it was terribly awkward trying to get the needle up underneath the previous row of stitches as per the instructions in my Anchor Book of Canvaswork Stitches.

Could you perhaps do it differently by going down underneath the previous stitches, which would be easier as you could push those stitches out of the way with the needle when taking it down through the fabric? I tried it on my canvas doodle cloth and yes, it works! The front looks pretty much identical (the blue line shows the stitch done according to the book, the pink line with the alternative way of working it) – any difference in the picture is, I think, the result of having done only two lines the alternative way, which makes it look less dense. It does use more thread on the back (the blue arrow in the second picture points to the tiny stitches on the back when doing it “properly”, the pink arrow to the longer stitches of the not-so-awkward variation) but on the whole I’d say it’s worth it for being much less frustrating and a lot quicker.

So I gave that a try, and got to the first change in shading (dark/medium blend); then realised that I need to do the tail before continuing with the wing/body as it is further back in the design. I wanted to do it in satin stitch over a split stitch edge, so I have to come up at the body end, which would mess up the body stitching if I left it till later. In order to get the impression of texture in there in spite of the flat stitches, I chose to blend my dark and light brown, skipping the medium.

A tail needs seeing to first, with a split stitch outline

Blended satin stitch to make a perky tail

As for the ladybird, that comes from the needlepainting book I recently got. I’ve been wanting to try needlepainting, if only as a preparation for my Silk Shading module, and I also had some new (and older but not much used) fabrics and some new (and older but not much used) silks to experiment with. Fortunately the book comes with some beginner’s exercises and as there are three I’m going to try them with different combinations of fabric and thread. First up: a ladybird shell in Pipers floss silk on Empress Mills’ 440ct Egyptian cotton.

By the way, as I refused to believe that any cotton could have 440 threads to the inch (which is what the count would mean for a counted embroidery fabric like Lugana or Edinburgh linen), I did a bit of digging and found that in cotton for sheets etc. the count includes both the warp and the weft, so 440ct cotton will have 220 threads per inch horizontally and vertically. Still very fine, but not as eye-watering as it sounds at first!

The first, darkest silk for this is appropriately red, but the shading is not going to be subtle – I only have the Pipers silk in about seven jewel-like rainbow colours, so the shell will be worked in red, bright orange and bright yellow. The white will have to be borrowed from another brand of silk. Pipers floss silk is very fine, and being a filament silk it snags easily, which is why you can see the individual filaments in a few bits of the thread. Splitting the stitches took a lot of concentration, and very good lighting! The second picture shows the project with a standard match for scale (and in more accurate colours, having been photographed in daylight). It also shows that my initial row of long and short stitch does not have a very neat bottom edge, so I may unpick that part and start again.

And that’s where I am with these two experiments! I hope to be able to finish them over the Christmas period, while also getting some Canvaswork homework in. But for that, I’m waiting for a Christmas present…

Turning back time

Posted on 4th September, 2021 by Flights of Fancy

Unpicking is sometimes known, more optimistically, as reverse stitching. Fine if you discover your mistake fairly quickly and it’s a manageable number of stitches; but occasionally it’s easier to just cut everything out and start again. Here’s what happened when, having completed the whipped backstitch outline of the glass on my hourglass design, I ignored the project for a few days.

Picking it up again to work on the stem stitch posts I took the threaded needle that had been left in a corner of the fabric and started stitching, while watching The Repair Shop in the background. The lines of stem stitch looked a bit thin, and I was grumbling to myself that it would take rather more lines to fill the post than I’d expected, but I was more than half concentrating on the restoration of a chess set on the television and just kept going. After three lines I came to the end of the thread, fastened off, fastened on a new thread from my ring of pre-cut cream pearl cotton, worked a few stitches and realised that these stitches were much chunkier, and a much lighter cream, than the ones that were altready there. You guessed it – the threaded needle stuck in the fabric had been threaded with the stranded cotton I’d used for attaching the spangles… There was no help for it, it all had to come out.

Undaunted, I re-started the post in the correct thread, and having finished the bottom half of the post I was about to move on to the top half, when I thought about the intervening space. Should I indicate in some way the outline of the post in the gaps between the spangles? I added single lines, but then realised I had intended the spangles to be like carved balls in the wooden posts, so the outlines of the post would have been “carved away”. Feeling rather like Oscar Wilde in reverse, I removed them. Still, it was useful to see the effect and know for certain that I didn’t like it!

Not time-related except that chipping is a very time-consuming technique, but I wanted to mention the use of close-up photographs when working stitched models. They are particularly useful when doing chipping because they show up any gaps that you may not notice when looking at the work in the ordinary way. In this case, I’m quite puite pleased with the coverage – it looks good and dense! Unfortunately close-ups also show other details, like those invaders that look like hairs. I can’t think what they are (unusually for the Figworthy household I don’t think they are cat fur) but at least they are pretty much invisible when you look at it with the naked eye. To give you an idea of scale, the photograph covers an area a little less than a square centimetre. I’ll probably get away with it .

Dorset (via Devon), a garden and some gold

Posted on 8th May, 2021 by Flights of Fancy

Among the various bits and pieces we brought back after my mother-in-law’s funeral there was a piece of red and white stitching on a scrap of blue fabric. It isn’t a full-blown embroidery, it looks more like a trial piece, but it’s unmistakably Dorset feather stitchery. I recognised it as such because some years ago I acquired a book about it, from (as I thought) a charity shop or possibly a car boot sale, describing the characteristics of this instantly recognisable style of embroidery: blanket stitch and chain stitch, both whipped and plain; fly stitch; single and double feather stitch; all worked into scrolls, lines and teardrop shapes.

When we got home I got the book out to show it to my husband side by side with his mother’s embroidery, only to discover that it very probably didn’t come from a charity shop at all, but from Elizabeth’s collection: her trial piece is an almost exact copy of the book’s Trial and Error Sampler!

She didn’t follow the pattern precisely – her top line is whipped chain stitch instead of blanket stitch, while the second-from-the-bottom line is feather stitch instead of chain stitch. The teardrop band is flipped upside down, the chain stitch wave has no spikes and the teardrop fillings are not the same either. All that sounds as though it must be quite different, but as you can see from the picture the differences really are very superficial. When I first read the book I’d contemplated doing the sampler but I never got round to it; now that I’ve got Elizabeth’s version I’ve seen the style in action without having to try it myself .

Another of her embroideries which we brought back was very much a complete project: a mixed-media piece inspired by Monet’s waterlilies. The background is, I think, painted rather than dyed, and in keeping with her philosophy (although she’d probably laugh if she heard me call it that) the bridge, flowers and trees are worked in only a handful of different stitches – as far as I’ve been able to make out, straight stitch, French knots, and chain stitch; satin stitch and seeding as well, but they are basically types of straight stitch. And yet for all its simplicity it is remarkably effective. It is a style I could never master, it’s too informal and free for me, but I admire it greatly when I see it done by others!

And to change the subject completely – remember my spectacularly unsuccessful attempt at making gold thread? As I was putting together a birthday card for a friend (which may become a freebie in the not too distant future) I noticed that traces of the gold leaf are still clinging to the dining table. That probably means they’re now an integral part of this piece of furniture; a nice conundrum for the experts if future generations ever take it to the Antiques Roadshow…

Silk thread and gold leaf, detaching itself from the paper

Waste knot, want knot

Posted on 15th June, 2020 by Flights of Fancy

Most stitchers I know are not enamoured of fastening on and off (and some, like me, therefore choose to use threads that are far too long and by doing so cause themselves more problems than if they’s just fastened on and off a bit more often…) Still, it has to be done, and recently I’ve been thinking a bit more about the various methods I use to fasten on and off, and what determines which one I choose.

First of all a confession. I use knots. At the back of my work. Drum me out of the Society of True Embroiderers if you like, but if I’m stitching a small project that will go into a padded card, standard knots will do me just fine (for fastening on, that is; I fasten off by weaving under previous stitches). Sometimes I use them in larger projects too, if I know the end product is going to be padded, and is not going to be handled or washed or generally fiddled with. So that’s the first method I use, and it is by far my favourite because it is quick and easy.

Quick and easy partly because I use a method for knotting the end of the thread which I learnt from my grandmother, and which I’ve only recently found out is known in English as a quilter’s knot or a tailor’s knot. Note about the pictures: I realised too late that the needle I’m using has a curved tip – I grabbed the first one that was about the right size and forgot that this was the one my husband bent for me as an experiment to use for ribbed spider’s web stitch. It makes no difference to the knot, but just in case it looks a bit odd in some of the pictures, that’s why .

Anyway, on to the knot. Thread your needle, then place the end of your thread on the needle’s eye. Place your thumb over it to keep it secure, then wrap the thread around the needle a few times. Push the wraps down the needle towards the eye so that you can pinch them with your thumb and forefinger, then very gently pull the needle through, and you’ll end up with a knot at the end of the thread. In effect you’ve just made a French knot without the fabric! Incidentally, the length of the tail after the knot depends on how much the thread overhangs the needle in the first step; I tend to put the very end of the thread onto the eye and so have practically no tail at all, but too little and it may undo itself. On the whole, however, this seems to be a perfectly secure way of making a knot.

However, most books on embroidery will tell you that it is better not to have knots at the back of your work. They may come undone, they may cause lumps and bumps, you may catch them with your needle – and so they advise a knotless way of fastening on. These often start with a knot, but it’s a knot that will get snipped off later, hence its name “waste knot”. Knot your thread, then start by taking the needle down somewhere along the line that you’ll be stitching so that the knot sits at the front of the fabric, then come up at the start of the design line and start stitching towards the knot. When you get to the knot, you can snip it off – but first check the back of your work! With stitches like stem stitch, the stitches at the back may not actually be covering the tail leading to the knot…

Take the needle down somewhere along the design line

Work your stitches in the usual way towards the knot

This is why a waste knot works best with stitches where the thread at the back of the work are at an angle to the tail you are trying to cover, rather than going in the same direction. The pictures below show a line of Palestrina knots being worked towards the waste knot; as you can see the stitches automatically secure the tail because of the way they are positioned.

Using a waste knot with Palestrina stitch

The stitching at the back crosses the thread tail

When the waste knot method is not ideal, you can use the away knot. This is like a waste knot a long way away instead of on the design line. As before, knot your thread, then start by taking the needle down a good distance away from your starting point (the tail needs to be long enough to thread comfortably in a needle). Work your stitches in the usual way, and after four or five stitches cut the away knot. You now have a tail at the back of the work.

Take the needle down a good way away from your starting point

You now have a tail at the back of the work

Thread the tail, then weave the needle behind a few stitches at the back as though you were fastening off. Snip off any excess thread and continue stitching.

Take the needle underneath a few stitches at the back of the work

And finally the method which uses/wastes the least thread of any no-remaining-knot ways of fastening on: anchoring stitches. This is the method they teach at the RSN, and which I’ve been using throughout my Jacobean Tree of Life. It has the advantage that you can start and finish at the front of the work so you don’t have to flip your hoop or frame – particularly useful when working with a cumbersome slate frame on trestles!

Knot your thread, then take the needle down either on the design line or in a nearby area that will be covered later. Work two or three tiny stab stitches (taking the needle straight up and down), then bring the needle up at the starting point. Work a few stitches according to the design, the snip off the knot. To fasten off (not shown in the pictures), work a few tiny stitches snuggled underneath your “proper” stitches or again on a line or in a shape that will be covered, bring the needle to the front and cut the thread.

With the knot at the front make a few tiny stitches on the design line,

Come up at the starting point, and after a few stitches snip off the knot

On the whole this works really well, but I have on occasion found myself pulling the thread through if I snipped the knot too quickly, especially with a slippery thread like silk; so if at all possible work a few stitches before cutting the knot.

There are other starting methods out there, like the pin stitch, but these are ones I find myself returning to most. If your favourite fastening on/fastening off method isn’t mentioned here, do champion it in the comments!

Playing with stitches

Posted on 14th April, 2020 by Flights of Fancy

After overcoming a certain amount of mental resistance, last weekend I finally put the first stitches into the very last part of my Jacobean Certificate piece: Lexi. I don’t know why I was so reluctant to start on her – perhaps because she is a fairly complex piece of stitching in that she is much less formal (and therefore less predictable and rule-based) than the rest of the design. Whatever the reason, I’d been putting it off but with my (admittedly self-imposed) deadline of 22nd April looming, I really needed to get on with it.

Well, she is far from being a complete cat yet, but the two furthest legs are done as is her tummy, and she has an outline – some of it in two strands, as advised by Helen McCook, to make the legs that are to the front of the image stand out more from the two dark legs in the background. With a bit of luck she will get her stripes (and I must not forget the light beige tip of the tail!) next weekend, after which all that remains is the wool wound around her.

In between trying to get the Certificate finished I’ve been having fun with other people’s designs, like this Sarah Homfray freebie (do have a look at her kits and supplies as well – now is a good time to support our independent designers!)

Someone on the Mary Corbet Facebook group asked me about the stitches I’d used, so I made a diagram like I did for Percy the Parrot (remember him?). The thread I used is Threadworx overdyed Vineyard silk and it’s really a bit too heavy for this size project, which is partly why my original plan for the stem didn’t work. Vineyard silk is two-ply, and the individual plies look rather like a very nice flat silk, so I started by separating the plies and working Palestrina stitch on the left-hand side of the stem, meaning to fill the whole stem with Palestrina, off-setting the knots in consecutive rows. Unfortunately the untwisted plies were not very stable and they kept fraying and breaking, so I had to go back to using the full two-ply silk, which was too thick for my Palestrina plan. Never mind, stem stitch to the rescue!

The other stitches were not planned in any way, I partly followed Sarah’s crewel version (especially in determining open and solid areas) and partly did my own thing, and I used stem stitch far too much – it’s such a versatile and easy stitch that in several places I decided I couldn’t be bothered trying something more decorative but also more complicated! In fact I’ve been playing with a fruit bowl design which I want to do in Bayeux stitch but which I think would also look quite good just outlined in stem stitch, perhaps as a Get Well card; what do you think?

A fruit bowl to play with

Flights of Fancy

Mabel's musings on anything stitchy

Category Archives: Stitches