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Month: March 2017

Revisiting Pekinese Stitch for TAST

My latest TAST embroidery sampler page revisits one of my favourite stitches, Pekinese (aka Pekingese) stitch.

While reading “New Stitches for Needlecraft” by Edith John, I found some examples I couldn’t wait to try out.

An embroidery sampler showing various ways to use Pekinese stitch.

My favourite techniques include stitching several rows of back stitch in shades of the same colour as I did with the pink and green arch, and stitching several rows of back stitch with gaps between the rows, as I did with the pear on the bottom left.

TAST is now a few stitches further along. I’ve been keeping up with my stitching, just not blogging about them so excuse me for a moment while I go and iron my new work so I can take photos!

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Algerian Eye Stitch Embroidery Sampler for TAST

Today is another TAST embroidery sampler or two, this time Algerian eye stitch.

My ideas for this stitch were simple, one worked on cotton quilting fabric over waste canvas. This is an embroidery canvas held together by a starchy substance. When you soak it in water you can pull the thread out with a pair of tweezers.

Various Algerian eye star motifs embroidered on a speckled black, blue and purple fabric.

I worked spot motifs and fillings using Appleton crewel wool, stranded floss, mercerised cotton and a firmly twisted rayon cord. The first four filings are from “The Stitches of Creative Embroidery” by Jacqueline Enthoven, while the others are ideas I came up with while playing with the stitch.

For my other sampler I wanted to play with making the holes in the centre of Algerian eye different sizes. I didn’t have any suitable fabric with a coarse enough weave, so I wove some square on a 4 inch square Loomette pin loom. The squares were woven and embroidered while still on the loom, then crocheted together to form the roughly 8 inch square format that I have been using for all my samplers.

An embroidered garden worked in Algerian eye stitch on pin loom squares. Four 4 inch squares are crocheted together to form an 8 inch sampler.

The squares are all woven with vintage dk weight needlepoint wool (aka tapestry wool).

  • The sun square is embroidered with soft cotton.
  • The sky square is embroidered with stranded floss for the sky and my beginner’s handspun cotton for the cloud.
  • The garden beds (on the bottom left) are, beginning at the top left and working clockwise: stranded floss, crewel wool, handspun cotton and thinner crewel wool.

And the final square is stranded cotton, crewel wool and needlepoint wool.

In my next post I revisited an old favourite. Stay tuned!

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Revisiting Shell Chain for the TAST Embroidery Challenge

I might have to rename this blog “Mostly Stitching”, or “Things Made of String” or something because today I have yet another TAST embroidery sampler to show.

I didn’t feel like I had given shell chain enough attention when I made my catch up samplers a while ago so I thought I’d have a play with it.

Embroidery sampler featuring a crab sitting on the ocean floor. Featuring shell chain and beaded shell chain stitches.

(Click on the photo for a larger view)

I call this my “Groovy Guru, Mr. Crab” sampler. Mr Crab is a pressed metal decoration that holds up our house number on the front of our house.

I wanted to try lots of different threads and also try making the stitch wider. The sunset is worked in two different variegated stranded cotton flosses.

The waves are a line of handspun wool and a line of mercerised cotton.

The water plants and ground are silk/wool worsted weight knitting yarn, various mercerised cottons and crewel embroidery wools.

Next I decided to play with making more loops for each stitch and changing the direction. I found out that version of shell chain is called “wave chain”, so whilst wave chain is not officially a TAST stitch (yet?), I added the name so I know later on.

Embroidery in white thread on a vintage purple serviette.

This sampler is mostly stitched in what I think is called number 16 floche. The downside of using op-shopped threads is that they sometimes have no label! Anyway, it’s roughly the size of two strands of floss.

The first line of shell stitch on the left is my beginner handspun cotton, and the rest is the floche. I basically tried everything I could think of.

What I learnt about shell chain:

  • It makes a great filling stitch.
  • It’s a lovely textural stitch for layering with the same, or different types of thread.
  • I need to draw parallel lines when working wave chain.
  • Shell chain LOVES blanket stitch. I tried all different combinations of shell chain and blanket stitch together but I think my absolute favourite is the circle near the bottom right corner.

So my feelings about “dull” little shell chain have completely reversed. I love it. In fact, I can see myself stitching shell chain and blanket stitch circles on more than one future project!

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