CREATIVE STITCH

First project on our Creative Stitch lessons, is the use of the simple running, or darning stitch, using a combination of colour and textured yarns to produce a beautiful touchable vibrant effect. Perhaps you did some of this as your first ever attempt at sewing in preschool or Kindergarten, it could be so effective now with the new yarns on the market.

What you need will be a selection of wools, and novelty yarns with texture and colour in mind. A large darning needle with a very large eye! and a piece of coloured hessian 20 x 25 cm..

It might be best to start off with zig zagging the edges of the hessian to stop them fraying. 2 cm in from the edge of the hessian pull a thread out of the loose weave, this will mark a nice straight line to work with, do the same with the other 3 sides, and you will have a nicely defined rectangle on the inside to call your work area. Now, using the simplest method, take your first yarn and leaving of approximately 5 cm hanging start in at one corner, and do a long stitch of say one cm (following the line across) put the needle in and out again a few mm on and repeat doing long stitch to the other side previous marked. Turn around and come back again, You can do anything between 3 to 6 rows in the one yarn depending on its thickness, or the look you like. Don't bother knotting off with these textured yarns it could end up very , bumpy, just turn the piece over when you are finished and lace the tail ends in and out where they cant be seen underneath. Continue on with the rest of your yarns until you have filled your marked work area.

Okay so you have mastered the straight lines of stitch, which can look very effective indeed, but if you want to try something different, add a little variation by trying another sampler, this time working in filling in random areas of squares or rectangles. Simply start off somewhere and do the same kind of straight stitch this time not continuing all the other way to the other side but stopping after say 6 cm and putting your needle to the back and up again a couple of holes underneath where you ended, you are now ready to start back the other way and do the next row, continuing on to complete a nice little rectangle.

Then start again with another yarn. You don't have to have the same size, in fact it is better to be random. You don't have to do the next one next door to the first, you may prefer to start on the opposite corner. That's fine, eventually you will fill in all the gaps and end up with a patchwork of different squares or rectangles, as shown in the illustration. Once you have mastered everything concerning the straight stitch, you may want to mix it up a bit and fill in small areas with other different stitches, such as detached chain stitch, fly stitch or blanket stitch. Of course not all yarns will be good for these stitches. But do experiment, and see where it leads you.

A little advice on mixing colours and textures: Colour, if you are working with two or three basic colour ranges i.e. blue, green and purple. Then it may be advisable to spread the colours around, don't put all the greens together, balance it up by spreading them around a bit over the whole work area. Same with textures, you don't want all of the furry ones in one corner, spread them out too.

How does it look.? For a further enhancement, you may like to follow my example and add in small clusters of coloured buttons or beads in areas that look a little sparse.

Don't worry if areas of the hessian are showing, that is the point of using the coloured hessian, it looks good!

If you wish you can forget the straight lines, or grids of rectangles and square, and just go random all over such as the piece pictured here.

Use one of the methods above to make the cushion front, with a work area of 40 cm square.

Take the two rectangles of fabric, which will be the cushion cover back. With each of them turn twice and stitch a small hem on one of the 42 cm sides. Now lay down the Cushion front front side up place one of the rectangles on top (right side down) with the hemmed edge towards the centre. Take the other rectangle and lay on top at the other end, so that the two hemmed edges overlap each other.

Now turn over and have the cushion front at the top. Now when you sew around the edges a 2 cm seam you can follow the already marked in line of your work space, and sew a neat square. Okay to make it easier to turn you may want to snip off the corners in your seam allowance, and turn right side out. The back has now formed into an envelope style cushion cover.