Hand Embroidery Tecniques!

Throughout this week I have been learning a variety of different hand stitch techniques.

A selection of learnt stitches

After learning basic line stitch, one of my favourite tasks was a sample of line stitch on various different types of fabrics to see how they looked and felt to stitch on. My fabrics included natural cream wool, wool delaine, bubble wrap, monkswool, sheer synthetic fabric and embossed wallpaper. It was interesting to see how it felt to stitch on the fabrics, hand how they looked, for example seeing the stitch on the back of the bubble wrap and sheer fabrics. Although most of the time I like to work on sheer, silk fabrics, I realised that for embroidery I preferred the thicker, substantial fabrics such as the monkswool.

Herringbone and Faggoting

After getting to grips with the basic stitches I learnt Shisha and Couching. I loved these stitches because they involved other objects apart from just stitch. My first sample of Shisha used two pence coins, and later I used inked paper. I enjoyed couching because it can be applied to anything; you could couch pencils, fabric, thread or paper.

I'm looking forward to developing these techniques into samples for my data project.