Stitching with a Shimmy

Don’t get the title wrong. I love me some cross stitch! I design it, after all… and I’m in love with the work of many many other designers out there – Tracy Horner, Joan Elliott, Jennifer Aikman-Smith, Erik Shipley- I’m looking at you! and a lot of others, too!

But sometimes I just want something else. So I turn to other forms of embroidery. WHY? Here are five of my favorite reasons…

1. I don’t have to count.Sometimes numbers just hurt my head; and putting the right number of stitches in the right place in the right color hurts even worse!

2. Some designs are just smoother in “traditional” embroidery than the pixellated version created by little crosses (or the designs are WAY too huge for the intended end use!).

3. I can stitch on anything. I love my expensive evenweave linens. I love to stitch on silk. But sometimes, you know, it’s nice to just pick up a piece of cotton fabric from one of my husband’s old dress shirts out of my fabric bin and stitch something. I have yet to get the tension right for waste canvas: so needlepainting or other stitching genres it is!

4. I lean toward big, complicated cross stitch charts. Sometimes it’s nice to choose my own colors without worrying about how it’s going to affect everything else in someone else’s design.

5. Did I mention I don’t have to count?

Dear Romilly,

Why is hand-dyed linen so much softer than the plain colored stuff I get at the LNS (local needlework store)?

Dear Stitcher,

There are a couple of reasons for this, mostly relating to the properties of linen, but one important one that relates to how newly woven linen is prepared and sold, and that is sizing.

Washing your linen before (or after) you stitch on it is a good idea in any case, for the following reasons:

• The sizing (glue or starch- really!) in the linen makes it stiffer, but it also can attract dirt and discolor over time. This one is the prime reason for washing your work after you have done your stitching, with some rare exceptions (all having to do with the threads you stitch with!)
  Also, all the linen fabric I’ve found has been woven somewhere outside of the US. Cargo containers are regularly fumigated with pesticides to get rid of unwanted visitors. Do you really want that stuff in your heirloom project?
• Washing linen makes it softer. You’ll find this with real linen clothing, too. Linen shirts get more and more comfortable and soft over time.

Hand dyed linen has already been washed. The sizing had to be removed so that the dye would bind to the fibers. Dye is often applied in a pot of water (more “washing,” though that is of course not what’s really going on). Then the fabric is rinsed thoroughly. While this last step isn’t really washing, it does serve the same purpose of beating on the fibers in the linen and making them softer.

In many independent dye houses, the final step is to wash the dyed fabric again to make absolutely certain all the dye has rinsed out.  Small independent dyers usually don’t put additional sizing back into the fabric, so it seems to be softer than fabric directly off the bolt.

I started thinking about this a couple years ago as a way to entice more knitters back to the “eyed needle” fold. There have been several patterns over the last few years in major publications that incorporate crewel work, from embroidered socks in an issue of Vogue Knitting to the Voyager Skirt in Romantic Knits.

Neither place does a really good job of explaining the problems of learning to embroider on knitting, especially in crewel stitches instead of “duplicate stitch.”

When I embroider on a piece of knitwear, I usually do it freestyle, with no pattern – because, quite frankly, transferring a pattern to a sweater is a pain. However, I would at some point like to knit the Voyager skirt, which has a very definite embroidered border. So I’ve been experimenting.

I am leaning toward recommending a wooden hoop and solvy dissolving paper stabilizer, because not only do I not like the feel of stabilizer on the back of my knits, I HATE having to work a pattern from the back, and I don’t think that particular skirt would hang correctly with stabilizer attached, so one of the dissolving stabilizers it is.

I’m going to try samples with two – the paper stabilizer and one that’s a clear plastic. I can see benefits of both, but I want to see which is easier to work with before I make recommendations. Stay tuned!