Learning Lots of Stitches & How to Go About It

A little while ago, I received an inquiry that I thought was pretty interesting.

There are so many embroidery stitches, but how do people really use them all? If I want to learn them, what’s the best way to go about it? And then how do you put them to use?

It’s actually more than one question, and it generates a whole slew of possibilities for answers.

My first answer was going to be simple, “You don’t.”

People, taken individually, don’t tend to learn every embroidery stitch under the sun, and they certainly don’t use all the embroidery stitches that have been implemented in stitchery over the ages in one project – or even in a whole lifetime of projects.

Most stitchers stick with a relatively small repertoire of stitches, in fact. And there’s nothing wrong with that!

But I figured that’s a rather simplistic answer.

If you’ve been hanging about on Needle ‘n Thread for a while, you know that I get into the whole notion of “playing” with embroidery stitches – of “sampling” (making samplers) with stitches, and in general, exploring stitches just for the fun of it.

But do I actually use all the stitches I’ve ever explored in any one project, let alone in any project at all?

Not necessarily.

A good example of this would be the plaited braid stitch. This is a complex stitch of many movements, and it eats up a heck of a lot of thread.

Still, it’s a fun stitch to know. It can certainly be a show-stopper and add a WOW element to piece of embroidery.

But I’ve never actually implemented it in a real project. I’ve played with it. I’ve practiced it. I’ve worked it out in small design samples and such. But do I have a finished project with the plaited braid stitch in it? No.

Maybe some day I will. But at this point, I don’t. Was it a waste to learn the stitch and master it? Not at all.

Learning Lots of Stitches

If you want to go about learning lots of stitches just for the fun of learning them, you don’t have to go about it in a specific way. You can just set up a piece of fabric and start playing with the stitches.

You never really know what will result! It doesn’t have to be anything formal. It can just be a completely random sampler of embroidery stitches. I’ve written about such samplers.

This article talks more in depth about the subject, and it also supplies some tips and other resources on working your own (random or not) sampler while learning embroidery stitches.

Using Lots of Stitches

Just because you learn a lot of stitches doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily use them all in finished projects.

But you can definitely benefit from learning the mechanics of many embroidery stitches. If nothing else, you’ll become very comfortable with needle and thread. You’ll understand how to follow stitch instructions. You’ll figure out how to trouble shoot. You’ll discover all kinds of things about threads, needles, fabric, and how they relate to each other.

Do you have to use every stitch you learn in a project?

No.

But if you want to embark on a project that employs lots of stitches, you certainly can! And there are many ways to go about doing it. Here are some ideas:

This blackwork fish project from eons ago is a sampler of sorts. It employs all kinds of stitches throughout the whole project and the result is a cohesive whole image.

This little needle book was made from a piece of fabric stitched up like a band sampler (with stitches and composite stitches worked in rows or bands).

The Leafy Tree is a stitch sampler of sorts, too. It employs a good array of stitches used throughout the leaves on the design, to make a cohesive whole.

This band sampler that I started in 2021 is just a band sampler and it’s not finished into anything. If I ever finished the very long strip of scrap linen that I started it on, I could perhaps frame it up or finish it for hanging on a wall or what-have-you. (I’ll probably never get that finished, though! It was fun while it lasted…)

Key to My Heart is certainly a sampler-like project – it employs a lot of stitches to make the completed project, and the back of it is worked in a sampler style.

The whole point of Stitch Sampler Alphabet was to sample a boatload of different stitches and composites and combinations, while completing an alphabet of decorative initials.

Cotton Quartet – one of the Stitch Snippet stitch-alongs from a couple years ago – is a sampler. The purpose of it was to sample different types of threads, more than stitches, but it samples stitches, too.

This is an interesting approach to a sampler. It’s a pennant banner worked by a chapter of the Embroiderers’ Guild of America, where each participant made up a pennant featuring an embroidery technique. Such a fun concept!

It Doesn’t Have to be Formal

Whatever the case, you don’t have to make your exploration of embroidery stitches a formal thing. It can just be casual, for fun, for learning, for gaining experience.

Then, if you want to, you can take your new-found skills and incorporate them into projects in all kinds of ways. The above list is just a small example of sampler-like projects that you could adopt ideas from.

Of course, wouldn’t it be fun to take all the known embroidery stitches in the Whole Wide World and work them into one project?

If you ever manage that, let me know, will you?!