Take a Stitch Tuesday 2012: Week 9 – Couching

March 3, 2012 at 9:47 am | Posted in Embroidery | 2 Comments
Tags: Couching, TAST 2012

When looking at the new challenge on Monday evening, I was a bit surprised. In my mind couching wasn’t classified as an embroidery stitch in itself but rather as a technique to use different embroidery stitches to hold down other threads. On second thought, I realized it is a stitch in itself, and one I’d love playing with! However, it was something I’d have a hard time integrating in my sampler so far, therefore I decided to branch out a bit. Looking at the threads I had available to play with, I found myself a scrap of red cotton fabric, collected all my red and reddish threads in one place, and started stitching. I specifically chose red because I have a small collection of novelty threads in that colour that would be fun to use for different effects. Here’s the result of my threadplay:

Since red has the tendency to be really hard to photograph well, please click on the pics for a bigger and clearer view.

I added some gold coloured crochet thread for additional sparkle. All the couching is done with one strand of a dark red embroidery cotton. Here’s a few pics of how the design developed:

I like the way how the different yarns give very different effects. Some of the novelty thread was a real pain to get to the back for securing, so I also got to try out the magic of the plunging lasso. Looking forward to next week!