Here's the last installment of this series of tutorials on hand embroidered lettering and text! Today, I'm going to take you quickly through the end of the stitching on my little sampler. For the final words, I've tried a couple new threads, but the stitches are ones we've already seen. If you're just joining in on the end of this series, you might want to take a look at the previous tutorials in the series, which cover all kinds of ways to hand embroider lettering.

I'm stitching the small filler words here, using three different types of threads for the remaining four words. I have few comments to make on the threads!



I stitched this short little "lazy" at the base of the sampler, using a relatively bright green over-dyed silk from Sassa Lynn. I liked these threads ok for this sampler. They're very soft. I think they're worked best in short lengths. I could see them being very nice threads for crazy quilting.



Here's the sampler after this word was added.



Now I ventured into this Burmilana, which I picked up on one of my shopping stops last summer while on vacation. This is the first time I've stitched with it. It's a wool and acrylic blend.



Oh my. I don't usually knock too many threads. But I don't think this one is made for surface embroidery. It is a pill. And it pills - and it fuzzes - and it's just really difficult to work with. I tried working with a crewel needle, a chenille needle, and even a milliner (thinking the round eye might wreak less havoc on the thread), stitching with short lengths of the thread, but really, what it boils down to is that this is a difficult thread to stitch with.



Perhaps, on a large-holed canvas, it may work better, and indeed, that may be what the manufacturers had in mind for this thread. But I'm pretty sure it wasn't made for surface embroidery.

The whole time I was stitching with it, I was thinking to myself, "Oh. Yuck."

And this brings me back to the whole question of embroidery supplies. If you're going to invest in supplies, do make your investment worthwhile by purchasing items you know are made for surface embroidery!



Here's the sampler so far, on an angle....



Using one strand of Pearsall's in a wheat color, I stitched this tiny "quick" in stem stitch.

Pearsall's is a nice silk. It's a little pricey, but it is a nice thread. It's softly twisted filament silk, so it has a very nice sheen. It also snags on things easily.

My advice is not to stitch with Pearsall's right after you've put up your Christmas tree - or you'll end up with a lot of these:



This is Pearsall's in red (which I used for the very last word on the sampler), after snagging it on my scratched and raw tree-fingers!



And there's the finish of my rather crowded and somewhat colorful and fairly nonsensical lettering sampler.

When you embroider text, remember the golden rule of all writing: The purpose of writing is communication! If writing does not communicate, then what is the point of writing? If your lettering does not communicate what it is meant to communicate, then the effort is wasted! Choose stitches that best communicate to your reader, and arrange the words so that they communicate your thought clearly to your reader, too. If you follow those rules, you'll have no problems with stitching readable text!

I hope you enjoyed this series! You can find the rest of it under "Tips and Tricks for Hand Embroidery" in the top right column, under editor's floss. There, you'll find all kinds of useful articles for beginners and beyond.

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Other News:

Don't forget my current give-away ends this Saturday, December 26th. If you'd like the opportunity to win one of Trish Burr's project CDs, don't forget to follow the directions in the original post for leaving a comment!

Speaking of that give-away, if you're in the US and you're looking for Trish's DVD / CD set, you can definitely order it through Nordic Needle, if you call them to place the order. It's not on their website yet, but they do have it in stock.

Today, I'm planning to finish the Nichole needlebook! Wish me luck. I'll share the finish with you in upcoming days.

But speaking of upcoming days, tomorrow is Christmas! Yes, I will still post - a Merry Christmas message for you, done by hand (but not stitched!). Right now, though, I'm not really replying to e-mail, unless it is urgent. If you've written in the last few days with a question, never fear - I will reply! But it may be a couple days yet. If you do have an urgent question, feel free to drop a line and let me know! I'll try to get to you sooner.

Here in the Midwest, we're anticipating a big ice and snow storm starting today, so it will be a perfect day for indoor finish work, wrapping presents, and getting ready for tomorrow.

May you have a peaceful, quiet, not-too-hectic Christmas Eve!

Labels: beginner embroidery, embroidery tips and tricks, hand embroidered lettering, Hand embroidery stitches, needlework pictures, needlework tutorials, pictures, sampler, stitch along

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Posted By: Mary Corbet on Thursday, December 24, 2009
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For the next word on my hand embroidered lettering sampler, I'm using a wonderful silk by Treenway Silk out of Canada, and I'm revisiting the whipped backstitch for the letters, because I like the resulting chunky-twistiness of it when worked with this silk.

In the fifth lesson of this series of tutorials on hand embroidered lettering, I addressed the whipped backstitch for producing a fine, tiny line for little letters. If you change your thread to something a bit heavier, though, you can change the look of the whipped backstitch considerably!



Treenway silk "cord" (I don't know why they call it that) is similar to about a #8 pearl cotton. It reminds me a lot of some silk buttonhole twists, but I think it actually may be slightly heavier, and perhaps slightly softer in its twist.



Anyway, whatever the case, it's a beautiful thread. It's a bit boingy, though, so you might straighten it before stitching. I like to do this over the spout of a whistling tea kettle. Just hold the silk in both hands, pulling slightly, and move it back and forth in the steam. It'll relax the kinks almost immediately. As far as "kinks" go, though, this thread isn't too bad - if you don't do anything to it to help it relax, you can solve any twisting problems as you stitch by letting your needle dangle so the thread can untwist itself. None of this is said to intimidate you from trying this thread, though - like I said, it's a beautiful thread!



I'm working on the large "Quick" on the top right corner of the sampler. I wanted to use a thread that's somewhat dark, since this is the boundary of the piece. Since the letters are large, and since this thread is a somewhat heavier thread, the whipped backstitch makes a nice bold letter here. And I like the way the thread twists and untwists with the stitch. I like the very-slightly-wiggly-look.



To keep your thread twisting in the same direction, you might have to turn your hoop and work upside down now and then. All of this is explained in Lesson 5 of this series of tutorials. You can also read my notes about the importance of stitch direction with whipped stitches, if you are curious about stitch direction.



There's a little nubby thing going on with the U there, and I'll probably have to pick that out. With thicker threads, it's sometimes difficult to join the intersections in the letters smoothly. But I didn't notice that, really, until just now!



And here's the sampler so far!

If you're looking for Treenway Silk, you can find it at Nordic Needle, where you'll find the thread accompanied by gorgeous overdyed silk ribbon that matches the various colors. Well, you already know I'm a sucker for threads - but when I see this beautiful thread paired with its ribbon counterpart, I melt! It is Really Pretty.

If you're looking for more tutorials on hand embroidered lettering and text, you can visit the index for this series of tutorials, where you'll find all 12 previous articles on the topic, full of step-by-step directions on how to write with your needle and thread!

Labels: beginner embroidery, embroidery lessons, embroidery resources, hand embroidered lettering, Hand embroidery stitches, needlework pictures, needlework tutorials, pictures, silk

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Posted By: Mary Corbet on Wednesday, December 16, 2009
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Coral stitch is one of my favorite embroidery stitches, when I'm in the mood for it. When I'm not in the mood for it, it quickly slides to the bottom of the list! You can do a lot with the coral stitch - you can create nubby lines and curves, or you can even fill spaces by working lines and alternating the placement of the knots that the stitch produces. In this little example on my lettering sampler, I'm stitching some small letters - the word "dogs" - with coral stitch to create nubby letters.

If you're just joining in here, you may wish to go through the other tutorials in this series on hand embroidered lettering. At this point in the series, the basics of stitching letters have already been covered, and you can find them in the earlier tutorials.

If you want to know how to work the coral stitch - or any other stitch used in this series, as a matter of fact - you can visit my video library of hand embroidery stitches. That's where you'll find instructions on individual stitches.



On this lettering sampler, I'm stitching the word "dogs" in the lower left corner of the sampler. The red circle in the photo above indicates where this word is on the sampler, though you'll probably notice that there's no S on the end of the word! When I originally wrote out the text for this series, I wrote it incorrectly - it should read "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Since I left the S out, I'm trying to work in a few of them after "dog" here and there.



I'm going to use a reddish-orange cotton floche for this word, and you can see in the photo above (circled in black) that I've penciled in an S.



I ran into two difficulties with coral stitch on this word:

1. I've got my project set up in a bound hoop, with the fabric stretched taut in the hoop. This is not the easiest way to stitch coral stitches - it's much easier to work coral stitch in hand, without a hoop, because you can manipulate the fabric. Since I'm working in a hoop, I resorted to the "stab" method of stitching. That is, I'm stabbing into the fabric and taking my needle and working thread all the way to the back of the fabric and then again to the front of the fabric, with every step of the stitch. Normally, with coral stitch, it's easier to "scoop" your needle back and front again (the "sewing method" of hand embroidery), without actually taking your hand to the back of your fabric to pull the needle through. Still, stabbing works, and that's how I worked the stitch on these letters.

2. The letters are small and relatively curvy. They are no more than half an inch high, which makes the curves in them just a bit tight. And this goes back to point #1 - if I were working in hand rather than in a hoop, it would be easier to maneuver around these curves. The stab method of stitching made it possible to get around the curves.



When "stabbing" instead of "sewing," you have to make sure you're bringing your needle up into the loop of thread, in order to make the knot. Sometimes, I end up with very exaggerated loops!



At the beginning of the top of the D, my stitches are a bit too crowded, so I started spacing them out a bit as I worked down the D.



Coral stitch looks better when the knots are evenly spaced. Still, on such little letters, the overall outcome of the uneven stitches wasn't that disturbing. They ended up looking ok overall.



When you work around the O in the coral stitch, try to space your knots so that your last knot lands in the right spot, so that the beginning and ending point are not noticeable.



The D and the O. DO.



And then the G. DOG.



And finally, the straggling S, which was the most difficult letter to stitch because of the tight curves on an S only half an inch high. I admit it got a little sloppy there!



But, overall, it worked out ok. Here's the sampler so far.

As you can see, I'm starting to stitch the extra words now. Most of the extras will be stitched in many of the same stitches we've already covered in this series of tutorials, but now we can have some fun testing new threads and seeing how the stitches and letters work out, depending on the threads we use. The sampler's turning out to be fairly colorful, and at this point, I've really enjoyed the stitching.

But there's a word coming up, stitched in a thread that was new to me, that I really (REALLY) didn't like, so it'll be fun showing you that word. Wow. It was about the most unpleasant stitching experience I've had, and the reason, I have no doubt, goes back to the materials used.

And that brings me around to a subject I want to write about in some upcoming posts: the whole question of the materials we choose to embroider with. Is this a subject you would be interested in hearing my take on? Or do you get quite enough of that from me already? What think you?

Despite the busy time of year, don't forget to relax a bit this weekend and get some stitching in! It'll keep you sane!

Enjoy the weekend!

Labels: beginner embroidery, embroidery lessons, embroidery tips and tricks, hand embroidered lettering, needlework tutorials, threads

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Posted By: Mary Corbet on Saturday, December 12, 2009
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This is a brief exercise in the Hand Embroidered Lettering series here on Needle 'n Thread. The word is short - "The" - and I'm using a fairly easy stitch for it (the heavy chain stitch). I'll tell you why I chose this stitch, show you the thread I'm using, and give you a look at the lettering sampler so far.

The word "The" on this lettering sampler needed to be embroidered with a fairly fine thread, as the letters are small and a little loopy, but I didn't want the word itself to be so finely stitched that it got lost in the sampler.



I selected this Gloriana twisted silk, overdyed in pinks and yellows, because it's a pretty thread, kind of like a buttonhole silk, only finer.



In fact, it's a beautiful thread! With the lighter colors of the thread, I wanted a stitch heavier than a stem stitch or a chain stitch, so that the word would show up next to the bolder colors around it. Hence, I settled on the heavy chain stitch. If you don't know how to work this stitch, check out the video tutorial for the heavy chain stitch - it will get you started.



I began at the base of the vertical line of the T, and worked up and around the loop on the right, then crossed over the top of the vertical line.



I began the H at the top loop, worked around the loop, and headed down the vertical spine of the letter, crossing over any embroidered paths in the way.



When I got to the end of the vertical spine, I jumped up to the hump of the H, beginning with my anchor stitch to hold the first chain loop. This is a little different from the instructions in the video, but obviously, you can get the same results with heavy chain stitch by stitching the anchor stitch first, then passing both loops through it to start the line. In fact, I've become accustomed to stitching the anchor stitch first, then stitching the loops. The effect is the same.



And then I followed through to the end of the word, crossing over any embroidered lines as I came to them.

It's not the most exciting word on the sampler, I suppose, but I really Really Like the heavy chain stitch for lettering. It makes a bold, even, smooth line and looks really good on lettering.



Here's the sampler so far.

This particular tutorial doesn't go into a lot of detail on the actual stitching of the word, because we've pretty much covered all the basics in previous tutorials. If you want to catch up on the basics that got us to this point in the sampler, you should go back to the previous lessons in this series of tutorials on hand embroidered lettering and text. There, you'll find all the hints, tricks, and tips on writing with your needle and thread.

Labels: beginner embroidery, embroidery lessons, embroidery tips and tricks, hand embroidered lettering, needlework pictures, needlework tutorials, pictures

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Posted By: Mary Corbet on Wednesday, December 09, 2009
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Continuing on with the hand embroidered lettering tutorials, today we'll be looking at combining stitches and colors in a word. We've already combined stitches in previous tutorials, but for this tutorial, we'll be working each letter in a different stitch, and we'll be exploring how some stitches that seem unconventional for writing with thread can be used to good effect to form letters.

If you're just joining in on these embroidered lettering tutorials, you can find the whole list of them under this Index of Tutorials for hand embroidered lettering. The previous tutorials in this series cover the basics of writing with needle and thread - from starting and ending threads, to stitching small letters, to traveling your threads on the back so that they are not visible on the front, to dotting your i's in different ways. So you might want to check those out for some background information.

In this tutorial, I'm stitching the word "Dog." I'm starting with a laced chain stitch for the D, then revisiting the whipped running stitch for the O, then working the G in French knots. For all the stitching, I'm using DMC floche in yellow and red.



Starting at the top of the D, I anchored the thread with tiny backstitches.



Then I worked the letter in chain stitch - the rounded part of the D first, then the spine.



Once the chain stitching was done, I changed threads to the red floche, which I'm using to lace the chain stitches. I brought the new thread up at the tip of the line of chain stitches that I wanted to lace.



Lacing a stitch (like the chain stitch) is not the same thing as "whipping" a stitch. The thread does not wrap around the stitches, but rather runs in and out underneath the stitches. So my first step was to run my needle underneath the first chain stitch. I'm not picking up any fabric - just running right under the stitch.



I gently pulled the working thread through, without putting too much tension on the thread. I want the laced red thread to be visible outside the yellow chain stitches. If you pull too tightly here, the red thread will not be as visible, so just pull gently until the lacing thread rests where you want it to. Then, run your needle in the opposite direction under the next stitch.



Continue alternating the direction of passing your needle underneath each chain stitch, so that you are basically zig-zagging underneath the chain stitches. Remember to keep the tension on the lacing thread relatively loose - don't pull hard on it, but leave it resting visibly outside the chain stitches. Pull these stitches enough to keep them even. Occasionally, you might have to tweak them a bit with your needle so that they are even.



Continue all the way around the bump of the D, and then take your thread to the back of the fabric at the end of the bump. Bring your thread up at the base of the spine of the D, and lace the chain stitches up the spine. When you're finished, it'll look pretty much like this. Kind of cute and colorful!



I worked the O in whipped backstitch. We've actually already covered whipped backstitch once in this series of tutorials, so I won't spend a lot of time going over it here. After stitching the backstitches, I changed to the yellow floche and brought my needle up inside the O.



Remember when whipping backstitches or running stitches to always travel in the same direction around all the stitches. You can turn your hoop as you stitch, to make this easier.



Keep the tension loose enough that you don't pull the whipped stitches straight. They should wind around the backstitches and should be clearly visible. When you arrive back around where you started, sink your needle to the back and anchor your threads by whipping around the stitches on the back of the fabric.



Now it's time to move on to the G. I worked the G in alternating colors of French knots - red and yellow. To make this easy, thread two needles, one with one color and one with the other, so that you can trade off needles as you switch colors. To make French knots Really Easy, I use a milliner needle. They always pass through the knot with great ease. If you don't have a milliner's needle, though, that's ok - embroidery needles work fine, too.



To begin, I anchored both threads with tiny backstitches that would be covered up with the French knots. Once both threads are anchored, you're ready to knot!



Simply follow the line of your letter, spacing your knots evenly. Don't crowd them too much - you want them to stand on their own, not jam up against the knots on each side. French knots tend to look better when they're not crowded tight together.



Work the French knots around the curve of the G and then into the center on the cross bar of the G.



At first I wasn't sure how well French knots would form a letter, but once I finished the G, I was sold on the look. I like it!



Here is Dog - colorful and a bit whimsical.



I wasn't quite ready to stop there, though. The O seemed a bit skimpy, so I threaded up my yellow floche again, and brought my needle up just inside the lower edge of the O, in the center.



I worked two little fans of daisy stitches inside the O, at the top and base of the letter. Then I threaded the red floche...



... and added a little French knot and some straight stitches in red, to finish the inside of the the letter. At this point, I was thinking that things might be getting too cutesy and circus-like, but I left it.



And here is Dog, again, finished.



And this is the whole sampler so far.

I guess the whole point of this lesson is to encourage you not to restrict yourself to one stitch for a word, or even to one color. You can play around with stitches, experiment a bit, add little extra details and so forth to personalize your lettering - and have a lot of fun doing it!

Enjoy the lesson, and have fun stitching!

Labels: beginner embroidery, embroidery tips and tricks, hand embroidered lettering, needlework pictures, needlework tutorials, pictures

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Posted By: Mary Corbet on Wednesday, December 02, 2009
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