Filling Stitches Sampler – Flat Stitch and Pekinese Stitch

underatopazsky

Nov 19

Last week's addition to the Filling Stitch Sampler project was a new stitch to me - Flat Stitch. It one I found in my 1950s copy of Mary Thomas and I liked that it looks a bit like satin stitch, but because it's worked in two stages, like fishbone stitch, you can cover larger areas. I split up my leaf into sections and hoped that the subtle line you get where the two sections overlap would look like veins.

The stitch is a shallow v-shape and the example shown in Mary Thomas is a heart, which of course works perfectly as it's a shape with a v-shaped top. However, when you are trying to work it in a space with a flat or worse, pointed top, it needs a bit of adjusting.

I found that for my leaf sections it helped to draw a channel down the middle of the shape first and then make a single foundation stitch of a straight stitch across the width of the channel. Then I could add in the slanted stitches, working alternately from the left of the foundation stitch to just underneath the foundation stitch on the right-hand line of the channel and again from the right. A pointed start, we found in the group, can be worked by starting in the same way as fishbone stitch, with a vertical stitch in the top centre of the channel and then adding shallow slanted stitches either side in the same way.

Next week is Pekinese Stitch, a stitch I have a very soft spot for. It was one of the first stitches I taught myself as a child from my Mum's copy of Mary Thomas and I loved how fancy it made my lines! It wasn't until I saw this early 20th century Chinese motif at Gawthorpe Hall that I realised how effective it looks as a filling stitch and how interesting the loopy textures make it.

I worked mine in a paler cream to mid brown variegated thread for the back stitch base and threaded it with another variegated thread in darker browns. I chose to stop the threaded part of the stitch at the end of the lines because I liked the little triangular green spaces it left, but if you continue threading into the back stitch at the start of the next row, it will fill the spaces in.