TAST II Catchup: Sword Stitch

This is sword stitch for the tast challenge, done a bit irregular as a possible filling stitch. The sorbello-like stitches and the flower-like thing constructed from them are eastern stitch, yet another sorbello stitch variant.

TAST Catchup: Raised Herringbone Band

I did a little bit of catch up, here is the raised herringbone band stitch of the TAST challenge.

I was not impressed with my first trial, mainly because 6 strands of normal stranded cotton thread is not quite enough to give good coverage on my aida fabric. So the stitch looks somewhat ragged.

For my next trial, I did long stitches spanning all along the band, then covered them with the smaller stitches the original pattern calls for. As you can see, this creates better coverage and imho also makes the herringbone band sits better on the slightly raised stitches.

I did the same for the third and last sample of the stitch. I also wrapped the herringbone stitches differently for a chance. I quite like this variant.

TAST II: Italian Knotted Border Stitch

This is my effort so far for this week’s TAST challenge, italian knotted border stitch.. In Germany it’s monday, so I’m kind of on time!

It is a really versatile stitch, you can do anything with it you can do with regular fly stitch, of which it is a variation.

Sorbello Stitch II

I played with sorbello stitch a lot on my sampler and want to share more of my experiences than a simple look at the sorbello section of my tast sampler will show.

Sorbello stitch as cross stitch surrogate

Firstly, I found an interesting blog post. At Vijis Craft There is a posting about using sorbello stitch in chicken scratch instead of cross stitches. An interesting idea that is probably worth trying, thank you Viji!

Generally Sorbello stitch can be used as a fancy replacement for cross stitch. To do this, make sure your stitches are exactly square and use a yarn that is covering the groud well. This is good for small and simple designs. Another thing that I still need to try is combining it with regular cross stitch.

Working sorbello stitch to and fro

Sorbello stitch has a direction, for an orderly look you need to carry the yarn back to the start on the wrong side and always work all stitches in a piece in the same direction, execpt when you consciously play with the difference.
When you have to do many rows this will get annoying. Here I show you a way to work it to and fro.

Sorry the bad oictures, they were taken on the train. I hope you still get how the stitch is done.

This is how the classical sorbello stitch is done:

And this is the reverse one for the back rows: