Don’t you just love embroidery projects that allow you to stitch seemingly endless lines of design, without having to start and end your threads often?

In Stitching Heaven, we’ll be able to stitch indefinitely, with miraculously never-ending threads that don’t fray, that don’t tangle. When we want to change colors or thread types, we will merely think it, and it will be done. We won’t have knots on the back of our fabric and every stitch will cooperate. We won’t make mistakes, but we might change our minds. And when we change our minds, previous stitches will disappear as quickly as we can breathe the wish.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it?

After a while, though, I’d get bored. The challenges of stitchery – and overcoming the challenges – may not be half the fun of embroidery, but they are almost all the satisfaction. If you didn’t have to overcome any challenge at all when stitching, would you be nearly as satisfied with your finished project?

One challenge that we have all faced at some point is that of starting and ending threads in a way that is secure, that makes sense for the particular project, and that won’t impair the finished design.

Today, I’ll show you how I’m starting and ending stitches on the Hungarian Redwork Runner. These are methods we’ve discussed before, but here, you’ll see them in action on a real project. I’ve made one alteration in the ending of my threads, though, for this particular project, so we’ll look at that up close and I’ll tell you why I’m doing it.