First the whole sampler. I know, not much progress for a whole weekend. The red batch with my initials is going to be handmade cut work. Which is time consuming to do, and I’m not as good at it as I would like to be.

The next picture shows the group of flowers, with many ways of doing leaves in buttonhole stitch.

The next one shows one more way to do leaves, which I got from let’s learn embroidery.

the soil section has buttonhole bars, buttonhole weels and areas of detatched buttonhole filling.

On another note, I am disappointed with my new camera. Good as it is in good light, it did a lousy job that night. I used ISO 400 fixed and changed between manual mode and image noise suppression mode, and still everything is full of image noise! I have yet to find a small cam which is useful during concerts. Any ideas anyone?

Well, the first band were Nemesea, they were kind of interesting but I so did not like the voice of the singer, and she does not sound better on youtube at all.

Now, there are the pics of the heros of that night!

Just a quick word: TAST stitch 2 is buttonhole stitch

I haven’t done much with it yet and will probably only get round to it next weekend. This is my buttonhole sampler UFO from the very first TAST. It shows mainly different methods of working leaves in buttonhole stitches. I hope it will get finished this time round, or at least close to it.

I called in sick because of the tummy bug, so lots of stitching time. I continued with my sampler and the fly stitches.

The little bell in tis section was attached to some sweets I got from a patient at the hospital where I work. I added it to comemmorate the festive seasons and all the niceties from random people I recieved. The band was couched down using fly stitches, of course. The section also shows stray little fly stitches used as filling, on one side regular, on one side random. There are few things you can’t do with fly stitch.

This section shows fly stitch threaded with another thread and fly stitch used to couch down thick wool to fill a larger area. Both variants are from Jaqueline Enthoven’s book. The last row are big herringbone stitches tied down with fly stitches. That one is from Sharon Bs original posting.

The first part of this section shows freeform leaves and ferns. Some of them have wipped stems. You just do fly stitches with legs next to each other and then wip or lace the stitches like you would with back stitches.
The next two rows are combunations of fly stitches and cross stitches/ straight stitches (the latter ones in violet in each row)
The next row is fly and two ties stitch from Jaqueline Enthoven, together with little cross stitches. The last row is twisted fly and two ties, again from Enthoven’s book. Both are nice stitches I will want to explore further one day.

For those who didn’t read it: before i knew that TAST will run again I set myself two challenges:
a) work a sampler or two in order to learn all the stitches in Jaqueline Enthoven’s ” The Stitches of Creative Embroidery”
b) make a dent in my UFO pile
I try to combine those with TAST

This section shows some patterns done from fly stitches. It taught me that such patterns should be planned on paper and be done on easiely countable evenweave to be effective.
The last rows show zig zag fly stitch from Enthoven’s book. I did not really like this one because it pulls out of shape easiely. In the last row, I tied down the loops with little straight stitches, this version might have potential as a decorative border stitch.

The last row is the first row of buttonhole stitch. just couldn’t resist last night.

So, happy, healthy new year to you all.

And yes, there’s an exciting new challenge on Sharon B’s blog. She’s running Take a Stitch Tuesday challenge again, see Take a Stitch Tuesday 2012 Challenge Information page. Which means, she’ll propose a stitch every tuesday and participants try them out. I answered to the original posting that I’m looking forward to seeing participants work, but won’t take part due to my notorious inabillity to follow up with challenges as required. Obviously, she did not really read those gazillions of replies and added me to the particpants list. So I’ll take this as a good omen and take part. I do love challenges.

So, Take a Stitch Tuesday Week 1 is fly stitch, one of those stitches you cannot really do justice in one week imho. Anyway, I added it to my current sampler, drawing inspirations from the appropriate chapter of Eindhoven’s book. I’ll probably try to do more later this weekend.

The two leaves in this section were knitted for a holiday knit along on ravelry. Beside them, there’s some free form fly stitch.

The next row shows a few ways to combine fly stitches to patterns. The possibilities there are truly endless. The last two variants are from the book, the green ones are tied down with detached chain stitches, this is also called tete de boef stitch, or when connected “pulled-through cable stitch. I’m showing this one here. I did some more with tete de boef stitch on that other sampler, but I just realized I haven’t really photographed that. Maybe I should. the lilac stitches are tied down with bullion stitches.

But on fabrics like hessian or canvas, I add a dash of fabric glue to the backside of the nun stitched edge. On medium thread count, tightly woven embroidery fabrics such as hardanger a nun stitch edge is pretty secure in my experience when it is done properly. Of course it is not secure enough for clothes or anything else that will be machine washed or otherwise mistreated.

It will be insecure on slippery fabrics like rayon, some manmade fibers and some silks. It is not secure on needlepoint canvas which is too stiff to pull the fabric threads together.

On open fabrics such as linen usable for pulled thread work and all forms of scrim or mesh this stitch will not produce a secure edging, there are various better options for such fabrics.

On anything with a substantially higher thread count than hardanger this stitch works but is tendious to do, and there are various other options for finishing those.

Funnily, when I was a young teen I invented a variant of nun stitch. I did it like the real one but only did one backstitch – one overcast stitch instead of doubling them. I had no access to a sewing machine and was desperate for a way to keep coarse fabrics from fraying. Guess how surprised I was when I aquired a copy of Therese Dilmond’s Encyclopedia of Needlework and found the real nun stitch in there. By the way, on fine countable fabric or when the edges will be bound or overstitched later I still use my method, it’s faster and in these cases just as durable.

I also invented a crochet version of this back in the day, but that is (maybe) for another post…

But now to the stitch

As preparation, cut the fabric to shape following the threads of the fabric exactly. remove a few threads arround the edges, producing a fringe of the desired length. Use a fine strong thread like pearl cotton, buttonhole sewing thread or mercericed crochet cotton. Floss will not be strong enough.

Work on the front side, working in the direction most comfortable for you. When doing this stitch it is important to pull the working thread hard so that the fabric threads over which you work are bound together in little bundles. Be careful not to pull the whole fabric out of shape.

Secure the thread on the backside 2 threads away from the edge. Do a backstitch over 2 threads.

Do a second backstitch over the first, doubling it.

do an overcast stitch over the edge of the fabric as shown.

overcast the same thread bundle once more

Do another back stitch as shown, then double it again (not shown)

Do the next overcast stitch as shown, then double it

That’s it. Remember to pull the threads hard. if the edge feels insecure, glue the backside of the edge.

And finally, this is how a corner is supposed to look like. For them, just do double back stitch – double overcast stitch – double overcast stitch on second edge – double back stitch.

Meh that was a lot of typing and pic inserting. If this leaves any questions open just ask.

And fina