Around the World in 80 stitches – part 9

February 5, 2013 by Carole 6 Comments

I loved this section. There were plenty of new stitches for me to try, all of which I enjoyed doing and I love that this part isn’t quite as full as the others so that the beautiful centre section is shown off to its best. It’s going to look gorgeous with the beads added at the end. This is a bit of a photo heavy post, as there are lots of close-ups of all the different stitches. Firstly, the completed part nine.

At the top and bottom the group of stitches is the same, but done slightly differently to accommodate the shape of the section. I really like how adaptable the stitches are in all these different shapes. The green is Chinese stitch, which was one of the new ones and one that I thought was very easy to do. The pink is Ray stitch, which is used a lot in this design, but can be done in so many variations so it seems a good one to make use of. The bronze-looking stitch is a trio of Lazy Daisys in an overdye that shades to pink.

This one is Crown stitch and another one that I hadn’t come across before. It’ll have four beads in the centre eventually. I enjoyed doing this one and again it was a nice easy one. I like the effect.

The Clematis square is yet another completely new one and was done in four steps using two colours. I think it’s a really pretty stitch and it was quite simple to do. It’s surrounded by more Lazy Daisys in the green.

The centre is my favourite part of this section. I absolutely love it. There’s a lot going on in there and I really enjoyed stitching it. The metallic in the very centre is a Smyrna Cross. Around that are Rice stitches in two strands and around those are Chinese Rice stitches in three strands. Both of the Rice stitches are in the same blue overdyed thread. The four paler blue bars are Persian stitch. They took a bit more concentration for the counting but were easy enough. Finally the green squares are Bokhara couching. They took a lot of concentration but they’re one of my favourite stitches in this section. I love the way they look. Both the Persian stitch and the Bokhara Couching were new ones for me.

As I haven’t posted a photo of the full piece for a few months, I gave it a quick introduction to the iron earlier so I could get a slightly better shot of it. It’s getting quite large now so it’s trickier to get a good photo on my small desk but this one isn’t too bad.

Back to the start of my rotation now, which means Around the World in 80 days. Unless I sneak in February’s Song of the Weather, that is. It’s printed off, and it’s calling to me…