Take a Stitch Tuesday 2012: Week 7 – Detached Chain Stitch

February 18, 2012 at 8:03 pm | Posted in Embroidery | 1 Comment
Tags: detached chain stitch, TAST 2012

In week seven, we get to play with detached chain stitch, which is definitely familiar to me. Before trying up to come with ideas and variations, I decided to figure out which basic forms the stitch can take:

Basically, you can vary the length of the loop or the length of the stitch catching the loop down. A few variants of this are shown in yellow at the top. The stitch with the longest tying stitch reminded me of some flowers where the seeds form a ball. I tried to capture that look in red below. An option with the short form would be an ear of grain. This could also be done with the stitches the other way round and a slightly longer tie stitch, if you have a grain that has a long hair sticking out. My version looks more like wheat, the other one could be used for barley.

Next up, leaves. I was thinking of chestnut leaves when working this one, but there are quite a few plants with similar leaf forms. In the spirit of playing with different threads, I worked the upper leaf in two strands of embroidery cotton, and the lower one in Nr. 8 perle cotton. To the left, another common leaf form. Lots of plantlife that can be depicted with this stitch.

To fill the space below the red seed pods, I got out another type of yarn I haven’t used yet on the sampler: the leftovers of a wool embroidery project. I haven’t shown that one yet since it is connected with the last stop on my fibery holidays last year, and since I just posted about the second-to-last this week, I hope I’ll get around to it next week! Be sure to check it out, since this stop was the most interesting in the lot for embroiderers.