Stitchonary No 7: Woven Stitch

Craft YourSelf Silly Stitchonaries

No 7. Woven 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 7. Woven Stitch

Woven stitches are fantastic fillers and ways to add texture, and they're fun. As always this stitchonary will make a great reference manual for future use.

I went to town on my little goldfish as you can see and gave him some shiny water to swim in courtesy of the Cosmic Shimmer fabric paints.

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.

Oval stitch, a basic way to weave a set of flowers....i've used my inktense pencils to ground the flowers and colour the sky and stem stitch for the stems...i've mixed threads to create different colour blends.

This is a great page for trying out different thread thicknesses, thread types, weave angles and combinations....Have fun and create a great reference page.

Bees, each one is woven slightly differently using the different weaves practiced on the previous page, the honeycombs are coloured with a combination of inktense pencils and Cosmic Shimmer Fabric Paints

Picot stitch was one of those stitches i avoided for years as it seemed more complicated than it actually is, i had great fun playing on this page and coloured the bird with Cosmic Shimmer Fabric Paints.

Another new stitch for me, but i had alot of fun playing with it as you can see. 

Again i played with this one, a little light background colour and a woven leaf completed the apple and of course, as always ive labelled my stitches so i can refer back to them.

The back page is a great opportunity to play with the stitches learnt throughout the stitchonary.  I went a little crazy with this one but had so much fun doing it.

Next up is No 8. Cut Work