sampler 2011 Archives - Page 2 of 2

It’s going to be Embroidery Monday here for a while as I work through my embroidery sampler. Maybe before the end I’ll have my sewing machine back from the shop and be able to put it together into its finished form, which will involve more decorative embroidery along the seams.

Oh, French knots. It took me so long to successfully, consistently make French knots. Of course, it didn’t help that I was trying them on Aida (cross-stitch) fabric, which has enormous holes — the better for your knot to pull through and completely come undone, my dear. They are one of the few stitches I think it is easier to make neatly on ordinary fabric.

This installment of the embroidery sampler tour covers multiple kinds of knots, and cross-stitch. I wasn’t sure I should even include cross-stitch, since it is so well covered elsewhere, but we’ll look at it in brief.

The knot panel of the sampler was originally supposed to also contain satin stitch, but I omitted that almost entirely, so it’s just a little light instead. I didn’t show the back, either, because it’s not illuminating. Here is the key to all knots: tighten the thread down around the needle before pulling the needle all the way through the fabric. If you leave the thread wrapped up around the needle while pulling the needle through, it will not stay neat. Tug on the loose end to get the wraps tightened down where the needle meets the fabric, and then put your thumb on them while pulling the needle through. Much better results.

The most common knot is the French knot, which is made simply by wrapping the thread twice around the needle and inserting the needle right next to where it came up – or even in the same space. I have seen directions to wrap clockwise and counter-clockwise, and I did both in the course of making the knots below. Can you tell any difference?

The shooting stars in the lower left are tailed French knots, made the same way as regular French knots except that the needle is inserted further away from where the thread came up. Tightening the knot before pulling the needle through is vital in this one. The little corkscrew is my effort to show the wrapping; the purple thread that goes through it is the needle, and it should point down and to the left. That is, the wrapping proceeds from eye to point. The green knots were made with four strands of floss instead of two.

A tailed French knot with several additional wraps becomes a bullion knot. Well, sort of. To make a bullion, after bringing the thread to the front of the fabric at a point we’ll call A, insert the needle a distance away and back up at A, without pulling it through at all (it should be going through the fabric like a safety pin). Wrap the thread five or six times around the needle, from eye to point again, and then pull the needle through. This is one where tightening the wraps on the needle too much is problematic, because it becomes difficult to get the needle through. However, if you tighten them gently and put your thumb on them while pulling, they should still make a reasonable bullion.

The second picture above was made with bullions and French knots. In the first picture, again, the green floss was four-stranded and the rest two-stranded, and the upper green bullion shows you what happens when you don’t put your needle in a full bullion-length away.

The colonial knot, on the left below, is supposed to be a larger knot than the French knot, and the Chinese knot, on the right, is a smaller one. I didn’t get an enormous difference among the three, honestly, but someone who’s worked more knots and has more consistency probably would. In both of them the thread is tacked down by the stitch. With thread on the front of the fabric and needle pointing toward the top of the work, the colonial knot is made by bringing the thread over the needle to the right, under the needle to the left and below (eye-side of) the first wrap, over the needle to the right again and under to the left and above (point-side of) the first wrap. Then the needle is inserted next to where the thread came up, the wraps tightened, and the needle pulled through.

The Chinese knot has a nifty feature where you can leave it untightened to get a loop. The thread coming out of the fabric is looped so the loose end is underneath the end coming out of the fabric, and the needle is inserted into that loop next to where the thread comes out of the fabric. The wrap can be tightened on the needle to make the simple knot, or left looser to get the loop effect.

Finally, the four-legged knot is almost a woven stitch. Make a vertical stitch and bring the needle up at one end of the horizontal stitch. Hold the thread straight across, slide the needle under the vertical stitch and over the thread that loops back from the horizontal bar to the eye of the needle. Tighten that down on the middle of what will become the cross, and insert the needle through the fabric at the opposite end of the horizontal stitch.

I don’t have a lot of patience for knots, but there are some who use them exclusively, such as in these commercial kits for small rugs and similar pieces. All in knots. They give an impressive texture.

Finally, we come to cross-stitch. My first ever needlework project was in cross-stitch, and I would guess it predated any of my sewing efforts as well.

A basic cross-stitch is made by making a diagonal stitch in one direction, and topping it with a diagonal stitch in the opposite direction. When you wish to make a row of stitches, it is neater and more efficient to make all the bottom stitches first, and then move back across the row with the top stitches. In fact, if you can stand it, make all the bottom stitches there are before making any top stitches (at least in a particular color). Cross-stitch definitely benefits from having all crosses made with the same diagonal stitch on top, and in fact you will be dinged for having stitches that don’t go the same direction if you enter a competition.

The method is to go diagonally down in front and straight up in the back. The back then ends up looking like a bunch of doubled vertical stitches (a vertical from laying down the bottom half of the cross-stitch, and a vertical from coming back across with the top halves).

As an aside, you have two options for starting the next stitch when moving across a row. Suppose you have made a diagonal from northwest to southeast. You could go due north or due east to start the next one. Embroidery stitches in general look nicer when you take the thread in right angles or tighter than when the angles are obtuse. In our example, going due north will take the thread 45 degrees from its previous direction, and going east will make the angle 135 degrees. Therefore, north is preferable.

This leads us to double cross-stitch, which makes a star. This stitch, even when used in the same manner as cross-stitch, is made one star at a time. Make either the cross first or the plus first, but be consistent, and when you move from one to the other take the thread across the back, not to a neighboring spot. That is, if you make the cross first and end in the southeastern corner, go to the north or west spot to start the plus, not the south or east part.

Finally, herringbone stitch. This relative of cross-stitch is not just a spread-out version – in fact you can make it quite tight together. The corners of your crosses no longer meet, and you alternate diagonal directions with each stitch. The method: make a diagonal stitch. Bring the needle back up horizontally behind where it went down, and make another diagonal stitch. Repeat.

Of course cross-stitch is most often used to “color in” regions and make pictures. You can see I free-handed the one below, but you can cross-stitch successfully on plain fabric by making pencil lines to guide you.

The edges I am thinking of here are in particular the binding for the quilted potholders I make.

I’m in the process of making an embroidery sampler for the class I’m hoping to teach in the fall, so I’ll work from the blanket stitch panel of that. There are four stitches I’ve used for potholder binding: blanket stitch, closed blanket stitch, up and down blanket stitch, and Cretan stitch. That last is usually classed with the feather stitches but it also has the feel of a blanket stitch family member.

In the upper left corner we have a front and back view of standard blanket stitch. The right end of the stitching is intended to help clarify the making of the stitch: come up through the fabric on the line you would like thread to run along (the edge if you are edging a blanket or stitching down binding). This is the northwest corner of a square. Stitch down through the fabric at the southeast corner, and before you tighten the thread, come up at the northeast corner and under the thread. When you tighten the stitch you should get two sides of a square. You’re now at the northwest corner of a new square.

I’m not a very good judge of lefty/righty business, since I make my stitches upside-down pretty regularly and, though nominally left-handed, stitch preferentially with my right hand, though my left will come into play if the space is too awkward for my right. However, it is easiest to stitch toward your stitching hand with this (it allows you to pull toward the next stitch and give resistance to the caught thread right at the corner), so if you are left-handed, either turn this over and stitch with the straight line on the bottom, or stitch up northeast, down southwest, and up northwest.

I’ve used this on a number of potholders, but none I’ve blogged about. You can imagine it, I’m sure.

To start a new thread, at the last corner of a square make a tiny stitch over the caught thread (this is also how I finish the whole thing) and knot or otherwise finish your initial thread. Take the new thread up where the final upward stitch of the previous thread had been (i.e., catching the thread a second time) and continue.

Ordinary blanket is convenient because it looks the same on the front and the back provided you are working at an edge, so you can continue the same stitch around your potholder loop.

Closed blanket stitch is very similar. It alternates a stitch with a short crossbar and a vertical that pushes out to the right further with a stitch with a long crossbar and a vertical that pushes out to the left, meeting the vertical of the previous stitch. It too looks the same on the back, and stops and starts the same way as standard blanket stitch.

I used closed blanket stitch on the butterfly potholders.

I started getting somewhat bored with blanket stitch and more recently tried a fancier version called up and down blanket stitch. You can see the finished potholders for this and Cretan stitch in the potholder tutorial entry. This has two steps, and the closeup spreads out the legs of the stitch before trying to show the construction:

Up and down blanket starts exactly like standard blanket, but instead of progressing to a new stitch immediately you take the needle down through the fabric next to where it has just come up, and bring it up next to the bottom end of the previous vertical. Catch the thread before tightening the stitch, and you’ll get a doubled vertical with a little holding stitch making the corners with the crossbars to the left and right.

To start a new thread it is best to finish after the standard blanket stitch portion. Start a new thread as for blanket, and make the second half of the current stitch.

Unfortunately, although up and down blanket is almost the same on the back, the verticals are further apart (at least mine are). You can either simply deal with that and use it on the potholder loop, or you can do what I did, which was to make paired whipstitches where the thread joining the pairs to each other went between the layers of bias tape. This was kind of laborious, though the look was good.

The process: after coming up, wrap around the edge of the tape, come up through one layer, slide the needle between the layers about a quarter inch over and then come up through the second layer. Repeat.

Finally, I tried Cretan stitch, which isn’t called a blanket stitch typically, but resembles a blanket stitch with the verticals alternating between going upward and downward from the crossbar. It didn’t feel as sturdy though it shouldn’t have enough stress on it in the context of potholder binding to matter.

To do this one, well, you could start exactly as you do for blanket stitch. When you come up at the northeast corner, it is now the southwest corner of the next square. Put your needle down at the new northeast corner and up through the southeast corner, catching the thread. You’re ready for the next stitch, at the northwest corner of the next square. The closeup starts halfway through that process and does the standard blanket second, and has the more-proper Cretan trait of not putting the northeast (for blanket) and southeast (for the flipped blanket) corners on the same horizontal line, but having four distinct lines of stitching.

To edge the potholder loop on this pair I just did a short whipstitch, matching the length of the verticals of the Cretan stitch.

And since I have them, an explanation of the remaining stitches:

Long and short blanket stitch is anything you create by varying the lengths of the verticals.

Double blanket stitch is simply two separate rows of blanket, the second made slightly above and trailing the first.

Buttonhole stitch is blanket stitch made very close and tight together, even slightly tighter than the middle section of this example.

And finally, if you put blanket stitch on a curve it can be used for motifs rather than just edging. You can see you get a very different look depending on whether the crossbar is on the outside or the inside of the curve.

Tag: sampler 2011

Knots and crosses

Embroidery for edge finishing