Casalguidi is an embroidery technique, rather than just a stitch. It consists of very heavy raised stem stitch worked in curves, lines, squiggles, or what-have-you (whatever the design dictates), usually with a lighter background of pulled thread stitching. Casalguidi is usually a whitework embroidery technique, but the technique can be easily adapted to your surface embroidery, wherever you want a high-relief, textured line that tends to be somewhat heavy. It can be easily incorporated into stumpwork embroidery projects, too.

For today’s Stitch Play, as a follow-up to yesterday’s raised stem stitch, we’re going to look at Casalguidi, and hopefully, you’ll find lots of potential for this technique, at the various stages in the stitching. This is what we’re going to create: