Goodness gracious sakes alive!

I have eyes, thank the Good Lord!

But they’re not quite working in sync right now. On Monday, I had cataract surgery and lens replacement in my right eye, due to rapidly declining vision over the past five years, post chemo. Wow! It will make a difference once it’s all finished, I have no doubt. But my eyes are going to be wacky for a few weeks. My blog posting may end up being irregular, because it’s pretty uncomfortable. So far, the most tedious thing for me is trying to see a screen.

Talk-to-text is a marvel on the phone, though. It doesn’t work so well with the computer, because it’s extra hard to make corrections – and you must correct talk-to-text copy for public blog posts, because you never know what the computer will spit out in place of your words!

Incidentally, verbal commands to my computer don’t work at all for photo editing. I tried. “Crop!” I yelled. But nothing happened.

I haven’t even tried to stitch yet. I’ll leave that for a couple days.

Last week, in anticipation of this week’s upheaval in regular scheduling, I started to put together an update on my Stitch Fun 2021 sampler, so I’ll share a portion of that with you today with a very simple tip.

A little backstory on this sampler, for those who may not have heard of it before:

At the beginning of 2021, I had a somewhat overzealous idea that I would start a sampler for 2021, and stitch a little each day. Since one of my resolutions for 2021 was also to listen to the Bible in a Year podcast, I figured I would stitch on the sampler while listening to the podcast. That was my plan.

And it went pretty well for months, but I’ve fallen behind on it this summer. Sometimes, life just gets in the way!

I started catching up on it a couple weeks back, here and there, and I will continue to catch up as I can.

After my last update in April, I started playing with a bit of couching, which you can see in the photo above. The red and yellow lines are fly stitch couching – that is, I used fly stitches to secure long laid threads, achieving a colorful pattered strip.

The concept is pretty simple: lay two parallel of thread (in this case, the full six strands of DMC stranded cotton for each laid thread), and couch over them with vertical fly stitch, using the “arms” of the fly stitch to hold the threads in place. (I used three strands of DMC stranded cotton for the fly stitch.) The anchor of the fly stitch is situated between the two parallel long threads.

I switched up the colors for each strip, and changed the direction of the fly stitch.

I like the result!

You could also do the same thing on curved lines. Manipulate your laid threads along the curves, while you fly stitch to hold them in place. I could see using this method in crewel work for a stem, trunk, or branch, using a few strands of wool for the laid threads and couching over them with fly stitch in a contrasting color. I think it would look great on gentle curves!

The Take-Away

Here’s a take-away: couching can be done with numerous embroidery stitches. We often think of the technique as a simple straight stitch perpendicularly placed over the laid thread. But you can use all kinds of stitches as couching stitches! Fly stitch is merely one example.

So … go forth and play with couching, and see what you can come up with! It would be a fun study for a section on a band sampler!

More!

You can find other posts about this sampler on this list of articles tagged “sampler.” There are other sampler-related posts there – several of those from 2021 have to do with this project.

This article in particular clarifies a little more about the sampler and my approach to it.

Eventually, I will add a 2021 sampler index to the website for easy access, if people are interested.

Ta Ta For Now!

I may be back on Friday. Or I may not. It depends on how the eye goes today and tomorrow. I’ll plan on being here, but if I’m not, look for me Monday!

I regret not having planned ahead on this a little better, but it’s been a really chaotic summer for me. I finally realized that sometimes, you just have to roll with the punches. You can’t always get everything done that you want to, and that’s ok!

I’ll see you soon!