Today, I’d like to share with you some photos of a beautiful little piece of goldwork and silk embroidery, and perhaps meander through some musings about its background and make some comparisons with another piece of embroidery.

This is a piece of embroidery – one of four – that was sent to me by Larissa (thank you, Larissa!), a friend in Russia. If you’ve been reading Needle ‘n Thread for a while, you might remember Larissa. She’s the embroiderer behind this gorgeous goldwork and pearl embroidered frame and this bead and goldwork frame. Both pieces within both featured frames, by the way, are also embroidered – worked in tiny tent stitch!

Happy Wednesday, Everyone! It’s a glorious day here in Kansas – birds singing, sun shining, a light breeze blowing.

It makes me want to write about something sunshiny. And so, I’ll write about my sheep.

It’s been a while since I’ve taken you along on a Project Journey, hasn’t it? Well, since the Medallion, anyway!

I’m setting off now on two stitching journeys simultaneously, each one vastly different from the other. One project, you see, is being prepared as a possible teaching project. This means it can’t be published in full. The other is for collaboration on a book. And this means it can’t be published in full. And now you are privy to my sad blogging dilemma! But we’ll work through the dilemma, and hopefully we’ll find an acceptable middle way. Throughout both journeys, I’ll be sneaking you updates and even little embroidery tips that stem from the projects.

The first thing I did after working out the two designs was work up a color palette and think about threads.

Today, because it’s Monday and it’s always good to start the week on an Up Note, I’m going to give away an embroidery book!

Initially, I was going to give away two embroidery books today. But I have all kinds of Monday Morning Excuses why I changed my mind. The dominating reason, though, is that the books are completely unrelated (except in their use of needle and thread), and it occurred to me that, while you might really want one of them, you might not want the other. And what if you won the one you didn’t want??! Oh gosh! That would be the pits!!!

So I decided to do them separately. Today’s give-away:

I admit I went way overboard on this one! What I intended to be a quick, basic tutorial turned into something so thorough that by the time you finish going through it, you will be a master of the Interlaced Herringbone! You’ll be able to do it in your sleep…

Today’s Stitch Fun is a bit challenging – but, oh! the satisfaction of conquering a challenging stitch! True, this isn’t the Most Challenging Stitch Combination in the world, but it is challenging enough that many stitchers simply don’t bother to tackle it, even though it creates a beautiful, intricately laced border or band.

Tomorrow, I’ll have a Stitch Printable available for you. This is a new idea – we’ll see how it goes over. The Printable will take you step by step through the whole process of creating the interlaced herringbone, not only for the simple band shown below, but also on corners, complete frames, and circles. More on this at the end of today’s article!

The knotted pearl stitch used in hand embroidery is one of those fun, rhythmic stitches that works up fairly quickly.

The knotted pearl stitch is a lot like the Palestrina stitch, but it differs in two ways: 1. the direction it is stitches is reversed, and 2. there are two knots created in this stitch, rather than just the one knot created in the Palestrina stitch.

So the knotted pearl stitch ends up just a bit more “knotty” than the Palestrina stitch. Often, you’ll see the knotted pearl stitch called the “reverse Palestrina stitch,” but in fact, it isn’t actually the Palestrina stitch reversed – it has one additional step to it.