Cretan stitch gets a bad rap, in my opinion. It’s normally demonstrated open, with the stitches spread out so that they look kind of like a pointed and twisted herringbone stitch. And that’s all well and fine – but cretan stitch can do more than form decorative lines. When worked closed, it can fill up a space pretty effectively. It’s a perfect stitch for leaf shapes, for filled bars, petals, and so forth. Don’t underestimate the cretan stitch in its versatility!

This past Sunday, I posted a bit about an embroidery design that I’m looking forward to playing around with and adapting for a project. Thanks for all your input on that! I appreciate your comments and some very good ideas that I received both on the website and via e-mail! But I’m afraid I jumped ahead a bit…

My next, next project, which I have only slightly mentioned once, is this:

Last time we visited the spot sampler, we added some herringbone stitch to the sampler. Today, we’ll look at some filling techniques that work well on even-weave ground fabric. Specifically, we’ll look at darned fillings (uh… darned as in the darning stitch, which is really just running stitch), some lattice work, cloud filling, and others.

Most of the filling techniques I worked on my sampler are in 1″ squares, but some of my students worked some 2″ x 1″ rectangles – and other various sizes. You can work any size filled area you’d like, and you can get creative with your fillings, too, and incorporate them with other stitches on your sampler.

Last year, I visited San Carlos Borromeo Mission in Carmel, California, and while there, I had permission to take photos of the vestments in their museum. I wrote a brief comparison of two sets of vestments, one from the museum in Carmel (this Salvator Mundi set) and the Splendor Patris set at the vestment museum in Clyde, Missouri, because the faces in the two sets struck me as similar.

I thought I’d show you two motifs from the Salvator Mundi set – one of which I plan to use as a springboard for another embroidery project.

My mom and my sister are pretty proficient with the crochet hook. I am not. I can crochet, but normally, the product looks like some abnormal growth from the Depths of Beyond. But my mom can wield a crochet hook with skill, and lately she’s been playing around with little winter hats for her granddaughters.

When you see little winter hats for little girls and wee babies, do you automatically think “Embellish!”? Admittedly, I do. So I duly confiscated one of the hats and started playing around with some embellishment.

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve successfully produced video tutorials for different hand embroidery stitches. The collection of how-to embroidery videos here on Needle ‘n Thread includes over 50 videos of embroidery stitches, but they are all woefully outdated. I’m working on updating the collection, but golly, I’m slow! And on top of that, I think all the planets have to be aligned a certain way for each video to come together as it should!

But – today – finally – I’ve got one to share. It isn’t utterly perfect, but I hope you find it useful!

This video is for the Basket Stitch. I love this stitch! I’ve not used it much, but every time I have, I’ve been really satisfied with it! My most recent encounter with Basket Stitch was on the spot sampler:

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a “Embroidery Around the Traps” type post. This is my way of cataloging the various needlework websites and goings-on in the online needlework world that I’ve run into while squizzing about the internet lately.

It’s a leisurely meandering – and I hope you enjoy browsing these spots as much as I did!

First up – Trish Burr has a new blog: