Learn the Eye Stitch

Thank you, readers, for joining me on yet another new stitching adventure! Today we'll be learning the Eye Stitch, only we'll be cheating, because technically this stitch is just made up of two stitches we already know - satin stitch and back stitch. So let's dive in!

Today I'm working on some linen fabric instead of my normal tightly woven cotton. I like linen for this stitch because of the big "hole" in the center of the design that forms as you go, but if you don't like that, you could stitch this on anything. To get a truly symmetrical design, use any even weave fabric and count the threads. As you will probably be able to see from my examples, I just eye balled it.

To begin, find the center of where you want your eye stitch to go. You're going to make a total of 16 satin stitches in various lengths from the center. To make mine a little more even looking, I first made a cross of stitches, and then went back around my circle adding in the others.

First a cross

Then long diagonal stitches in between

Then finally shorter diagonal stitches in between each of those

Make sure you always end (or begin) each stitch in the same spot, and you'll see how the threads surround the hole for a nice eye catching center. 

Once you have all 16 of your stitches in place, just make a box around them using the back stitch. I made my box touch each stitch of my original cross, which helped me keep everything even. 

And there you have it, an Eye Stitch! These look especially nice next to each other in little rows, either touching or spaced out evenly. I made my finished design into a mini ornament, which I hung from my bulletin board at work. 

You could whip up a bunch of these in various colors SO FAST. They would make great additions to the outside of your holiday gifts or as ornaments, or just as decorations year round. 

I hope you enjoyed learning the Eye Stitch with me today! Upload your own designs to the Feeling Stitchy flickr pool for everyone to see, and comment below if you have any questions for me, or suggestions on what to stitch next! 

Happy Stitching!

Learn the Pekinese Stitch

Hello again readers! Some of you may have noticed I took last month off to handle some work issues, but now I'm back with a fun new stitch for us to learn, and I have to say, I really love this one!

Today we're going to look at the Pekinese Stitch, which I promise you is much easier than it looks.

Like almost every month I'm using two strands of cotton floss and cotton fabric stretched tight in a hoop. What can I say, I'm a creature of habit. Maybe next month I'll branch out! This stitch would actually be lovely with mixed fibers, and I'll definitely try that next.

Traditionally, the Pekinese stitch was used as a filler, but today we're going to learn it as an outline stitch.

Start with a back stitch along the line you want your Pekinese stitch. I found turning corners with this stitch to be a little difficult, but it follows curves beautifully. Once your back stitch is in place, you'll use another two strands of floss to add the flourish.

Come up with your needle at the beginning or far left of your back stitch. Skipping one stitch, loop your thread under the stitch from the bottom. Pull your thread through but leave loose. Then go under the first stitch from the top, going over the thread that you left across the bottom. Now you should have a little loop around your back stitches. Pictures help here.

Now that your first loop is in place, you will continue this pattern across your design until you reach the end.

I had some sharp turns in my design, so rather than try to turn the corner, I just stopped on one side and began again at the other. Perhaps an unorthodox method, but it made everything much neater.

And that's the Pekinese stitch! I love how it looks and while it can take a little practice to get all your little loops even, it's fairly simple to execute once you get the hang of it. To finish out my design I used seed stitch to fill in the wings, and satin stitch and french knots for the owl's face.

I hope you enjoyed learning a new stitch with me today. How would you use the Pekinese stitch in your embroidery designs? I'd love to hear and see! Comment below or share your projects in the Feeling Stitchy flickr pool!

Happy Stitching!

Learn the Couching Stitch

To those of you just now experiencing the height of summer weather, let me just share with you how incredibly jealous I am. Here in the South it's been the height of summer for a couple of months now, and the heat and humidity are definitely starting to take their toll! About all I can do these hot, sunny days is fan myself on the couch with a large glass of lemon-aid ice cream sandwich. Which of course makes our stitch today oh so appropriate, as we'll be learning to couch!

As much as I'd love to just share with you how I relax, couching is the name of our new stitch for August, and it's a pretty important one to have in your arsenal of stitches.

Couching keeps all your primary thread above the fabric, and you use a secondary thread to anchor it down to your design. It's a great way to work with materials that are otherwise hard to work with. Think metallic threads, unusually thick threads and a variety of other fibers.

So, let's begin! Start with your fabric stretched tightly in a hoop. I'm using cotton, but another beauty of this stitch is that as long as your fabric and your anchor material works well together, you're all set to use pretty much whatever you like.

Start by laying out your top thread, in my case all six strands of a super fun silver metallic, where you want it on the fabric, and hold in place with a finger or two. Using your anchor thread, in my case two strands of a bright red for easy to see contrast, come up with your needle just below the top thread. Stitch over the top thread and reinsert your needle into the fabric. Pull tight!

Working left to right, choose a small distance away to place another anchor stitch, repeating the same steps as above.

For your first few stitches, you'll probably need to work a little harder to hold your top thread in place. This can be both a good and bad thing, as it allows you to adjust your top thread as you go, but can also mean if you aren't careful you could end up pulling it right out of your anchors. Of course, you won't need both of your hands to take pictures while you stitch, so you might be a bit better off!

When couching you can really work in any shape. You'll want to up the quantity of anchor stitches around sharp turns and curves but the result is a nice thick line. Since I'm working in a nice shiny metallic thread, I drew a quick gemstone shape to stitch up.

I was able to stitch the entire design, including corners and curves, without changing out my top thread. If you've ever worked with metallic threads before you know how amazing that is!

When I got to a section that overlapped, I simply worked on top of the previous line of thread. When you're down, simply use your needle (I changed to a bigger one) to bring your top thread through the fabric, and tie off in the back. Once you get all those anchor stitches in, I promise the design isn't going anywhere!

And that's how to use the couching stitch! Hope you enjoyed learning with me today! Be sure to upload your examples into the Feeling Stitchy flickr pool, and let me know in the comments below how you plan to use this stitch. Happy Stitching!

Learn the Crown Stitch

Hard to believe it's already July! The summer is one of my favorite times of year. Everything slows down and with the longer days I seem to have all this extra energy to throw into my friends and family. And my stitching of course!

But seeing as how it's the Fourth of July, I'm guessing a lot of our readers have barbecues and fireworks to attend to when they're done here, so let's jump right in.

A bit of irony for your independence day: we're going to learn the crown stitch! As we've mostly been trying our hand at band and border stitches, this should be a nice change. The crown stitch is a isolated stitch that can also be used as a fill stitch when done together. It's pretty and as a bonus, super easy!

You can work this on plain or even weave fabric. It looks really lovely on linen with thin, delicate threads, but for today's lesson we'll stick with my standard cotton/stranded floss combo.

The base of the crown stitch is made up of three straight stitches. Start by making your first straight stitch in the middle of where you want your crown. Then, make one more stitch on each side at an angle, using the same hole as the top of your first stitch. Make your side stitches just a little shorter than the middle.

    

Then, pick a point above your left stitch and come up through the back of your fabric with your needle and thread. Thread your needle under the top point of all three stitches, and pull the thread through. Find a point above the right straight stitch to end your stitch.

         

 

And there you have it, a pretty little simple stitch! I must admit though, that to me this stitch also looks a good bit like a little dragonfly or butterfly! 

Above is one way you can use this stitch to fill in a shape, but you could also connect some of the stitches if you wanted your fill to be really tight. I didn't worry too much about that here in an effort to keep things simple, but couldn't resist adding some texture and extra color by scattering crown stitches throughout his wings.

I hope you enjoyed learning the crown stitch! How would you use this stitch in an embroidery project? Be sure to share some examples in the Feeling Stitchy Flickr pool, and enjoy your holiday!

Learn the Butterfly Chain Stitch

Happy Weekend, fellow stitchers!

It's the first weekend in June, which means summer is officially on the way. I bet many of you are preparing for long weeks ahead filled with travel, gardening projects or maybe figuring out how to entertain your kiddos when they finish up the school year! If that's the case, hopefully you have another week or two to relax and take some time out for yourself, which is why this is the perfect weekend to learn another stitch!

Today we're learning the Butterfly Chain Stitch, a very pretty border/band stitch that you can work on pretty much any fabric or canvas. Maybe it's just because it has the word butterfly in the name, but to me this stitch is perfect for summer. It's simple, but there is a special method to doing it correctly. In fact, I realized after I had taken all my photos that I had done the stitch incorrectly, so I had to go back and do it all again!

Setting up the stitch is simple. I'm working on pretty pale blue aida I found in my stash with stranded floss in a few different colors. To start, you'll make a series of three straight stitches evenly spaced across your fabric. These can be any size you want, and spaced any way you want.

Since I'm working on aida fabric, it's easy to put the exact same amount of space between your stitches, in my case 3. But if you're working on linen or cotton you can measure your spaces by making small notches on your finger to help with your spacing, like in the picture in the middle. Make as many sections as you like to fit your space. 

Now here's our trick. Sometimes a picture can do more for me than anything else, so I'll start there!

You'll work the decorative part of your band from right to left. Come up with your fabric to the far right of your last section of stitches. Place your floss over all three stitches. It helps to hold it tight out to the left, especially if you're working with a long piece of thread, so you can create a little loop for your needle. Slip your needle under the three stitches, then over the thread you're holding out to the side, and pull through. (If you're familiar with the twisted chain stitch, this is just like that!) Pull your stitch tight so that the thread pulls the three straight stitches together and pinches them in the middle.

Without piercing your fabric, repeat on all the other stacks. This part of the stitch is worked completely on top of the fabric. Here's another photo further down the row. You'll notice I change colors here, because this is the part I had to redo, after I had done all my other rows correctly :)

And there you have it- the Butterfly Chain Stitch! I love how creative you can be with this technique. I made a little sampler of different versions, most of which I just made up because I thought they would look neat!

I played with the spacing of my straight stitches on the top two rows, doing an even increase/decrease on both sides for the top one, then just showing different spacings on the second. To me, the more space you leave the more celebratory the band becomes. Our middle band is straight forward and by the book. Below that I really enjoyed playing with size. I did sets that were double the height with two evenly spaced decorative chain stitches on top. I think it looks like a little picket fence! The last one is my favorite. The center stitch of each section is slightly longer than the outer two, which makes our pinched sections look like little stars. This option would be lovely on a retro themed project or maybe even and art deco design.

I hope you enjoyed learning this new stitch with me! What ideas do you have for incorporating this into your every day stitching? Share them in the comments below or post projects in our Flickr pool for everyone to see. Happy Stitching!

Learn the Couched Filling Stitch

I don't know about all of you, dear readers, but I am so relived that it's finally the weekend. It's been so busy in my little world that I was thrilled to find the time to sit down and teach myself a new stitch from my encyclopedia this month, and it turned out to be a fun one!

Today we're going to learn something called the Couched Filling Stitch, also known as Jacobean couching. It's simple but the result is really fun! I love fill stitches like this that are open and airy. They lend themselves to so many different uses. This one is also a great fill stitch because the whole fill is worked at once, meaning you see progress much faster! 

Let's dive in! I'm working in a plain weave fabric, with two different colors of stranded floss. This stitch would also be beautiful on aida or canvas where you can count out your spacing and be really precise. It's extremely important to use a frame or hoop to stretch your fabric though, as we'll be starting with some long stitches that we want to keep tight and even. I'd also recommend a ruler and a pencil or (preferably) a water soluble pen. 

The first thing you need to do with this stitch is lay out your foundation stitches. You can eye ball it if you wish or count your stitches on your aida, but I used a ruler to make tick marks every quarter of an inch across my hoop. I did the same thing from top to bottom, making a right angle with my hash marks. You can see the cross section in pencil in the photo below.

Now you can begin stitch. You're going to create long stitches all the way across your hoop. Start in one direction (I chose top to bottom) and make all of those stitches first.

In the first picture, you can see how I used the ruler to guide my stitches and kept them aligned with the hash marks and nice and straight. This isn't necessary, but it really helped. Once you have all your stitches from top to bottom, do the same thing from side to side on top. (This is where a water soluble pen and a super tight hoop come in handy! You can see a few pencil marks because my fabric came a little loose while I was stitching.)

Unlike some other couching stitches where you have to weave your foundation stitches together, this one doesn't need that. It's going to look loose and messy at this point, but once we add our final step it will all fall into place.

Now that our whole area is covered in this grid, we're going to add individual cross stitches at every intersection to anchor the threads. You can begin anywhere in the area that you like. Simply choose an intersection and come up with your needle in the bottom left corner and go back through your fabric in the top right corner. Come up again in the top left, finishing in the bottom right.

Repeat this step at every intersection! If you're filling in a shape you can use different colors on your cross stitch to add shading or use a different texture from your foundation grid.

This would be a great fill stitch for any kind of silhouette project, and actually made me think of stars while I worked. It would be fun to use similar colored fabric and grid thread, and a metallic thread in certain spots to stitch the big dipper or other constellation. Of course, it also looks nice all on its own! 

I myself went a little rouge on my hoop. It's fun knowing how to complete all the traditional stitches, if only so I can break the rules when I use them later! 

I loved how geometric this was turning out, so I decided to leave a portion of my hoop open at the top with only vertical grid stitches, and to fill in only sections of my grid with cross stitches. Sometimes it's fun to use embroidery to simply create a texture, not stitch a particular object. Of course, you can see some spots where I missed the pencil marks completely, but those will erase right out! 

Well I hope you enjoyed learning the couched fill stitch, and if you already knew it I hope I inspired you to try it again in a fun new way! Be sure to upload your examples  of this stitch to the Flickr Pool for everyone to see and leave me a comment with any questions or suggestions. See you next time! 

Learn the Back Stitched Chain Stitch

I’m so thrilled to be sharing my first post on Feeling Stitchy! I’ve been a reader of the blog for a long time and it’s very exciting to now be a part of it.

I spend a lot of time stitching, but there are so many stitches I've never mastered, or even tried. So I’m going to work my way through an encyclopedia of stitches, learning and teaching you as I go!

Starting, well, now, I’ll share a quick how-to for a new stitch on the first Saturday of every month! You’ll notice I may not always do things the traditional way, but I like putting my own spin on things and making the stitches work for me.

So, let’s jump right in, shall we?

For my first post I started with an easy one- The Back Stitched Chain Stitch!

This is essentially just a combination of those two stitches, so I’m guessing most experienced stitchers will be able to jump right in!

I’m using contrasting colors of thread (stranded cotton) so you can easily see the two different parts.  Start by making a chain stitch across your fabric. I actually work chain stitch a little differently than most (it’s backwards!), which I’ll explain below. If you like your way, just skip to the next section!



Begin with an anchor stitch. Come up with your thread at a point just below your anchor or previous stitch. Pass your needle and thread through the anchor stitch, pulling all the way through. Then insert your needle back into the same hole you started with. Repeat until you have a chain as long as you like!

When your chain stitch is in place we’ll go back and add the back stitch.

Begin by finding the end of your chain and come up with your needle just after the “hump” of our first chain stitch. Back stitch into the final stitch of the chain and pull all the way through. Come up again just over the chain stitch and back stitch into beginning of the previous stitch. Continue until you’ve backstitched through the whole thing.

And that’s it! You can experiment with different color combinations, types of thread and even weight.

In the picture above I used several different combinations and stitch sizes. From top to bottom: single strand perle cotton in fun, loose loops and another in small, tight stitches. The bottom three back to stranded floss, 2 strands of pink and one strand of blue. Then 4 strands of pink, 2 strands of blue and the bottom example is 4 strands of pink, 4 strands of blue.

You can see how different this stitch looks in all these different forms, and I hope you feel inspired to add this fun texture to some of your embroidery! It would definitely make a great thick outline stitch, as well as be an interesting fill texture and sampler accent as well.

I chose to use this stitch to lend some fun texture/color to a little hoop I made inspired by The Avett Brothers, who just wrapped up a three night concert stay in my hometown!

I went back to my stranded floss and used an almost ombre color scheme. The ampersand is all done in our back stitched chain stitch, and the chain stitch lent itself nicely to all the curves on the fancy font. I also did some double rows to make parts of it thicker, so you can see how this would look worked side by side.

Well, that’s it for this month. I hope you enjoyed learning with me! If you stitch something using the back stitched chain stitch, be sure to upload it to the Flickr pool so everyone can see! Be sure to leave me a note in the comments if you have any special stitch requests, or have any questions and I'll see you next time!