Some more Worms

So I stitched two more worms to try some more things.

The fist one I stitched using pear cotton #5 either. I was planning to make it a really fat grub without taqper, but didn’t quite succeed. I had to add a few extra threads at the border in the middle of its fat belly.- I tried to make the stem stitches longer by leaving more space between the Foundation stitches, not sure this works better.

The last worm was done using stranded cotton floss – all six strands as they come off the skein – I think this works even better than pearl cotton.

Now here is the backside of one worm. This is what really worries me about this stitch – What to do with all these loose ends? The thing would get rather bulky if I weave them all in securely. In this project, the solution will be glue. What do you do about all the loose ends?

One last thing I learned about casalguidi stitch: If you have done a bulky “worm” and have trouble doing the last few rows of stem stitch because it is so high, just take the fabric out of the hoop- This will make it easier, and the whole thing is too big now to be ruined by a row or two with less than perfect tension.

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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.