Take a Stitch Tuesday 2012: Week 8 – Chain Stitch

February 25, 2012 at 7:03 pm | Posted in Embroidery | Leave a comment
Tags: chain-stitch, TAST 2012

After detached chain stitch last week, it was onwards to chain stitch for this week’s challenge. This is a familiar stitch again, and one that works up fairly quickly. While I have quite a few ideas what to do with chain stitch, I decided to start simple:

I went through my smallish stash of embroidery thread and played the old game of trying out all the crayons in the box, or all the different kinds of threads I could find. So, here’s the line-up from top to bottom: Nr. 8 and Nr. 5 perle cotton, a very fine wool thread, stranded cotton using one strand all the way through to six strands, Appleton crewel wool, the silk ribbon I’ve been playing with for couching, and Nr. 20 Coton à broder. Yup, that’s pretty much all I have. Not a lot, but quite a bit more than I remembered before I started on this exercise. I only remembered the Appleton wool left over from this project when I started to run out of ideas, and found the coton à broder hidden in the box of perle cotton. I’ll try to include a bit more variety of threads in the weekly challenges from now on.

Looking at all the lines, I think I could find good places to use all the different threads, but generally I like the clean look of the highly twisted threads – perle cotton and coton à broder. To continue in the quest for interesting materials I already have lying around, I found some green rickrack to use for couching, and it’s sewn down with chain stitch using Nr. 8 perle cotton.