Stitchonary No 6. Feather Stitch

Craft YourSelf Silly Stitchonaries

No 6. Feather Stitch

Stitchonaries are the modern day sampler, they're great for both beginners to learn with and for experienced embroiderers to practice on...and if i'm honest I've been embroidering for nearly 40 years now and they've featured stitches i didn't know and have enjoyed learning. there are 6 project pages as well as the front cover and a patterned back that you can embellish as you choose. They come as a complete panel and instructions on how to fold it into a floppy book, I've then taken that a step further and inserted card to stiffen the pages.

I would also recommend you invest in a heat erasable pen so you can draw any changes onto the page, stitch them and then iron away your lines. The Stranded Cotton used in these projects are from Marathon threads and available in a gorgeous range of colours at a very reasonable price...a great way to start building your embroidery stash.

In these Blogs i will take you through the stitchonaries one at a time and page by page to tell you what i have done and why. But i cant recommend them highly enough and they look awesome when finished too.

interested? check out the Craft yourself Silly Site or Hochanda.

No 6. Feather Stitch

Feather stitch is a fantastic stitch for working floral images ir trees etc. and along with the other stitches to learn in this stitchonary, its fun to play with as well. This stitchonary is the beginning of expanding your embroidery reportoire and as you can see from the cover of this one, i got a little carried away i was having so much fun.

I always take the time to neatly stitch in the text as it looks very effective, this can be done at any stage of the project and like any page you don't have to complete it in one go...although each page/project is small enough that there isn't really time to get bored or stressed and they look awesome when done.

Feather stitch practice, try different lengths of stitch and angles, play and get comfortable.

This is a great page for practicing turning corners and stitching in the round.....on your page you will see you only have 2 ovals, I've added a third to mine to see how it looks worked in a tight area. 

Fly stitch tree, and a little background colour added with inktense pencils.

Weirdly i struggled a little with quill stitch, as you can see, it was a new stitch to me and one i am resolved to practice more as its a fun variation.

Cretan stitch with different numbers of strands on the needle to see the effect the thicknesses had on the peice. One of my favourites i think

Again i played with thread thicknesses and i used my heat erasable pens to mark guidelines to stitch too so it looks neat. note that i have listed thread thicknesses where necessary on each page.

The back page is a great opportunity to play with the stitches learnt throughout the stitchonary. I have added extra colour with Cosmic Shimmer fabric paints.

Next up is No 7. Woven Stitch