Starting in November, I took an embroidery class online at Joggles.com from the amazing Sharon Boggin, who is also the host of the Take it Further Challenge. The class was titled “Personal Library of Stitches,” and the goal was to develop a repertoire of embroidery stitches and design concepts to create freehand works of embroidery. For the first lesson I started with this:

and then worked it up to this for the third lesson:

White Aida cloth 18 count, approximately 4″ x 6″, pearl cottons 8 and 12, and some DMC linen floss (chevron stitch, 1 strand). Outer row is simple backstitch, then raised blanket stitch, straight single feather stitch with lazy daisy accents, sorbello “butterflies” with a chain stitch, and chevron. The corners are a simple needlepoint cushion straight stitch. Center lines from the outside in are purple chain stitch, green cable chain, pink twisted chain, dark teal rosette chain, pink knotted cable chain, green coral stitch, and purple crested chain with varying widths. Bottom butterfly is triple chain with crossed and backstitched body, coral stitch “trail.”

Top Butterfly is triple chain, with origin point reversed to the outside and additional couching stitches to widen loops. Filling is berry stitch with a twisted chain center, body is a bullion knot with long-tail french knots for antenna. "Flower" from the outside in is purple chain stitch, variagated portuguese knotted stem stitch, blue knotted cable stitch, and pink back stitch to crested chain stitch.

Free stitching on Aida cloth is much harder than it looks.

This entry was posted by Jess on Monday, February 11th, 2008 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Handwork. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.