Stitches: What is What & How to Tell

Good morning.

Prepare yourself: I’m getting ready to Nerd Out on embroidery.

Below, you’ll see a picture of two leaves.

They pretty much both look the same.

Today, we’re going to chat a little bit about embroidery stitches – in particular about what you see on these leaves – and how you can best tell what stitch is what.

This article will morph into a tutorial down the road, and then we will troubleshoot some problems, talk about solutions, and look at alternatives.

All that, just from two leaves!

There they are. Two green leaves.

There’s nothing too, too special about them, in the Scheme of All Things Embroidery.

They don’t look awful. In fact, I’d say they look ok for what they are. They’re pretty smooth. They look like a decent embroidered representation of what they’re supposed to be.

Are they the prettiest embroidered leaves in the world? Maybe not. But they’re solid, decent leaves.

I used five strands of floss in the needle to stitch both of them. (Why five instead of six? No real reason, except I had used one strand from the six for something else, so I started with five and stuck with five.)

I’m working on linen.

I sketched the leaves with a pencil, straight onto the fabric.

As you can see, there’s nothing too complicated here!

So, what stitch did I use on the leaves? Are both leaves the same stitch?

They look the same, don’t they?

Normally, on any given embroidery project, if you’re stitching the same shaped element in the same manner and the same color so that it looks like all the other elements that are the same, you’d likely use the same stitch for each element, correct?

And that would make sense.

BUT… for this demo, I used two different stitches.

Can you tell what’s what?

Do you see a difference?

The only possible way to tell that there’s a definite difference between these to leaves is to flip the work over and look at the back.

The back of embroidery is where you can normally find, with certitude, all the clues that tell you how something was stitched.

And there’s the back.

Not too lovely.

But you can see that there are two decidedly different approaches to those leaves.

Now that you’ve seen the back, can you work out how each leaf was stitched?

Here they are again from the front:

And here they are, with their corresponding letters, on the back:

Ponder that, and we’ll continue the conversation with a tutorial shortly.

And then I’ll tell you what’s wrong with the leaves.

And then we’ll troubleshoot the problem and I’ll suggest some solutions.

All that. From two leaves.

You might be thinking Who Cares?!?!

Well, all I can say is, Welcome to Embroidery Nerddom. I hang out here a lot. It’s a fun place to be.

Have a love Wednesday!