Embroidered Bed linen - Blanket stitch, Berry Stitch,Fishbone stitch,Chemanthy stitch

A simple block this time...


The tiny petals are stitched with Berry Stitch . It is nothing but two lazy daisies stitched one inside the other. Do I have to tell you about the others?

A filler in between... chemanthy flowers, satin stitch flowers, and french knot flowers with blanket stitched leaves. See the Chemanthy tutorials here, here and here .

Next week, I'll show you the full view of the whole bedlinen. Hmm.. on second thoughts,should I? You're curious,aren't u? :) I've not even completed half of the pattern,a lot more blocks left. Be patient.


Love,luck and sunshine,
Deepa

Embroidered Bedlinen - Honeycomb blanket stitch,french knots

I've managed to finish a few more blocks on my bedlinen project . Last time , I'd claimed that this would be a slightly different one. I've finished it, now its for you to decide....

Well, the stitch is honeycomb blanket stitch. If you remember, it was a part of my ROSE sampler project. This stitch is also known as fishscale stitch. See the tutorial here.The center is filled with French knots. The leaves are also blanket stitched with feather stitch vein in the middle.

The brown flower is stitched with strands from silk skeins kindly sent to me from Delhi by a very good friend of mine, Anu.It was a first time experience for me since in my place we get silk threads only in spools. I used all the six strands for the heavy look. The colors are slightly different, right? Got the brown,green combi from the work on the dress of a friend of mine.

The first time I stitched the leaves, I filled them with fishbone stitch. But it was a mess. Had to pull out the whole thing and restitch all over again. Learnt a lesson the hard way - never attempt fishbone stitch on wide leaves. Long ones will work fine, but wide ones...no,no.

There's another block to be shown, but not today. I've run out of the alloted blog post time :)

Until next post,
Love, luck and sunshine,
Deepa

Embroidered Bedlinen - A project on filling techniques in Embroidery

Hello everyone!!!

Here is the index of all the posts related to my embroidered bedlinen. This project was envisioned with the idea of compiling the major filling techniques/stitches in surface embroidery on one piece of cloth.

The following links will take you to the posts related to this project.These are not actually tutorials, but it surely would give you an idea regarding the numerous filling stitches available .Probably you could use them in some of your projects.

Happy Stitching !!! :)

The beginning - design phase

Pattern tracing and deciding the colors

Block 1 - Herringbone stitch, Pistil Stitch , Cretan Stitch, Seed stitch

Block 2 - Fishbone stitch, Satin Variations

Block 3 -Roumanian Stitch, Slanted Satin Stitch

Block 4 - Kashmir Work ( Chain stitch filling), Fly Stitch

Block 5 - HoneyComb Blanket filling, French knots

Block 6 - Blanket stitch, Berry Stitch, Fishbone stitch and Chemanthy stitch

Block 7 -

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I'll be updating this page as and when I finish a block.

Embroidered bedlinen- back in action with Kashmir work

Greetings everyone,

Iam back in action after a small lull :) How are you all doing? Hope Deepavali and Halloween went well.

Our past couple of weeks were spent in my native town of Kannur. I got to meet my grandparents and all relatives after six long years. Meghna enjoyed her visit to the local places and loved meeting her big grandmothers and little grandparents - my father is her 'grandpa',his mom is her 'BIG grandma' and his younger brothers and wives are her 'little grandpa and grandma' :) Ofcourse, my husband was not part of this group - are there any husbands out there who love visiting their wive's side? - mine used his 'free time' to visit his own parents.

O.k, chit chat apart, I did manage a little bit of work on the bed linen during the past few days.This time, the filling is done with chain stitch. Chain stitch filling is a speciality of Kashmiri Kashida. Kashmir work uses stitches such as Chain, fly stitch, feather stitch, fern stitch, satin etc. The point to be noted about this type of embroidery is that it uses only one or two type of stitches in a piece , not all together. For instance, the whole embroidery could be done with chain stitch alone.
This block is not pure Kashmiri Kashida, but is inspired from the same. The leaves are all filled with fly stitch except the largest one. The work looks easy, after all its chain stitch, right? But, I had a tough time with the silk strands getting all tangled up. Kashmiri chain stitch is usually done with the Tambour needle. I used the standard ones.
The blue flower is blanket stitched and the center is Moggakuttu -a combination of fly stitch and detached chain.

Here's the big leaf again...chain stitched with two colors.

I've started another block - its a little different from the usual. Will show you what it is all about in the coming post. The good thing about such a varied pattern is that I do not get bored . My mind is constantly on the look out for new stitches which I can add on to the piece. How about you ? What do you do if constantly repeating a pattern bores you? I must say, I've huge admiration for those who embroider the 6 meter long saris and manage to finish it promptly.

See you soon,
Love,luck and sunshine,
Deepa

Embroidered bed linen -Roumanian stitch,Satin stitch

Thanks to everyone for the B'day wishes. I've passed it on to Meghna. She has still not come out of the b'day mood.Wants everyday to be her b'day :)

Coming back to stitching, another floral block on the bed linen is complete . This time I used two types of filling stitches. Can you identify them?

The darker shade flower is stitched using Roumanian stitch/Roman stitch. Note the texture of the petals. This is a variation of satin stitch where the satin stitch is tied down in the centre with a couching stitch. It is usually used when the area to be covered is larger and cannot be managed with satin alone. For still larger spaces, the stitch will have to be couched with multiple couching stitches and then it is called Roumanian couching. I used three strands of silk here due to which the petals look a bit heavy. The center is padded satin with french knots outline.


For the flower in the lighter shade I did try the same stitch,but it didn't look good - may be because the petals were too thin. So I settled for single strand slanted satin stitch. The single leaf is filled with herringbone stitch and the stem,for a change, is stitched with coral knots.

Here is a very interesting link for roumanian stitch

A very well written article on Romanian stitch at heritage shoppe

Iam sort of relieved that I completed this block. Infact, I pulled out various stitches atleast three or four times on this pattern. I was beginning to think that cloth is going to give up and come apart :)

Iam off to start the next floral block. There are plenty of filling stitches,but not all go with the pattern . If any of you have any suggestions for new stitches, please let me know.

Love,luck and sunshine
Deepa

Four years ago...

this day,a little angel came into our life....

We've cherished everyday with her since then. And those days will remain with us forever as fond memories as she grows up and goes out into the world making new friends other than her 'acha' and 'amma'.

Happy Birthday,my dear...

Stitch tutorials for beginners

Here's good news for those who are keen on learning emroidery. The hand embroidery network (HEN) is publishing stitch tutorials at their blog under the title "Stitch A Day" . Every day one stitch and its various variations are discussed and demonstrated. Please go and have a look at the hand embroidery blog . Additionally you can also join the HEN community to interact with like minded embroidery enthusiasts.


Another upcoming stitch dictionary also needs to be mentioned. Sarah of rocksea.org is posting stitch tutorials classified according to their family. I find this one interesting coz of the organized way she's going about the whole job. She has already published quite a few basic stitch families such as stem stitch and is working on some new stitches. Click on the sidebar links to view details about each stitch family.


Enjoy browsing through both the above mentioned links.These are good especially for beginners.

Love,luck and sunshine,
Deepa