Casalguidi Stitch

So Sharon B’s may challenge was casalguidi stitch.

I have to say that I never really liked the traditional casalguidi pieces, too many of them looked rather awkward and plump. I wanted to leave out this stitch and finish some of my other stuff instead. But as always Sharon’s stuff was too alluring so I ended up trying it anyway.

Well, my heart was screaming for something mixed media after all this long armed cross stitch on my assisi piece, so that’s what I’m gonna do. The surprise is for some other day, today I will just show how I learned casalguidi stitch.

So first you need padding. I used pearl cotton #3, probably the most expensive joice availiable, but that was what I hd on me on the commute that day. By the way, this is a picture of my second stab at the stitch, forgot to photograph that stage first time round.

I covered it with pearl cotton #8, fand used pearl cotton #5 for the foundation stitches and the raised stem stitch. Here I am halfway through the row of foundation stitches.

For the sake of completeness you can see here how the stem stitches over the foundation stitches are done. I just hope I’ve gotten that step right this time.

Well, I was going to stitch a grub or something similar, all this talk about this stitch looking like a grub on fabric made me do this. For this one, I had cut the batting so that the worm would be tapered at the ends, but now I had the problem that I needed more rows of stem stitch to cover its middle than at the ends. So I added some rows in the middle starting not at the end but a bit in, like shown. At the second end of the worm, I ended this row early the same way at the second end of the worm. The rows on the sides of the worm ran all along it’s ends.

Now meet the finished worm, photographed together with a pencil to give an impression of its 3d form.

And the same from above.