January TIF - Stitching 3

Gosh, this section has boggled my eyes! I’ve needed my clip on magnifiers and my task light to see properly and even then I’ve gone wrong several times. One row of stitches looked wrong as I was working it, so I took the stitches out and re-did it. I did this three times before I worked out that I had gone wrong on the previous row and that was the reason the current row would never look right. It probably would have been easier to see if I had used one of the stronger colours but I wanted to see how the stitch length affected the value of the colour and thought this would show more clearly with a paler colour.


The first three bands are running stitch, with each row of stitching stepped to form a chevron pattern. The first band (left) is stitched 2 over/2 under, the same as all the stitching in the central motif (ratio 1:1); the second is 3 over/1 under (3:1) and the third 4 over/2 under (2:1). As the second band has the highest ratio of thread on the surface to background colour, I would have expected this band to be the most prominent.


The remaining bands are all stitched 2 over/2under with alternating areas of thread and background to give a chequered effect. There are not many variations on this pattern you can do with a single colour, so I introduced the pale green (966) into the mix.


Happy Stitching