Quick Announcement: the new Handpicked Collection #6 is on sale this week! You can find my review for this book here, and you can find the book available here, at the lowest price you’ll see it in the US. If you want to add it to your library, now’s the perfect time!
As we continue exploring the Needle ‘n Thread Archives, I struggled with T, even though it’s a pretty common letter.
I realize I could have done “tea towels” for “T” – but these really cute Tea Time towels just came out last year. That doesn’t seem too archival to me.
And I could have just done thread, but good grief! Highlighting all the posts on the website having to do with thread would be a gargantuan task.
So instead, I went to stitches (again – we just did “Satin Stitch” for S!), and, after considering a few of them – trellis, twilling (which is just another name for Palestrina stitch), twisted chain, tambour, tulip, Turk’s head knot… I settled on Turkey Work, which is also called Ghiordes Knot Stitch.
Why this particular stitch? Because it’s so very archival – I published a video tutorial for Turkey Work way back in 2009, when Needle ‘n Thread was just a wee three-year-old.
Turkey Work: it’s fluffy!
It’s a technique wherein you build a looped “pile” made from locked stitches onto your fabric, you trim the looped pile, and then, if you want, you comb out the threads to make them even fluffier and puffier.
It’s a wonderful technique to use whenever you’re trying to create soft, fluffy dimension!
A tool that I like to use when using Turkey Work is called a “nap brush” or comb.
This alien-looking thing is ideal for brushing out the trimmed threads of Turkey Work, to separate all the plies and make the stitched area fuller.
And although the brush looks huge in the photos above, it’s really not. It fits on a finger, or you can just hold it between your finger and thumb while you gently comb out the stitches.
It’s a neat tool – even if it does look like the stuff of nightmares.
It’s not a necessary tool, though! You can fluff up your threads with the eye-end of your needle, too!
Once upon a time, I convinced my sister to use Turkey Work to gussy up this cross-stitched squirrel Christmas ornament.
She did! It was adorable!
And once upon a time, I played with a squirrel’s tail, too. This was way back when I was putting together all the little projects for Lavender Honey & Other Little Things.
It wasn’t adorable. It was a mess.
Needless to say, the squirrel didn’t make the cut for Lavender Honey!
Granted, the Turkey Work wasn’t necessarily to blame – the whole design just didn’t do it for me, and neither did the fabric I was stitching it on.
Sometimes, that’s just the way things work out! (They don’t!)
You can read about that tail going haywire here, and see the resulting clean-up of the tail. The squirrel itself never did please me.
Another place I used Turkey Work was the center of an embroidered daisy in this tutorial on how to embroider daisies.
That comes from the tutorial series called “How to Embroider (Blank)” – where we cover embroidering several different things – from daisies, to strawberries, grapes, a dragonfly… You can scroll through this index to see the fun project tutorials!
Looking for More?
And that, my friends, is Turkey Work with a T.
You can find other articles in the ABC Archive Series here, if you’d like an ABC guide to some archival highlights from the blog!
Hope you enjoy the journey!
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