For a bit of a change, I’m working on Mary Corbet’s Lattice Jumble but doing it with my own touches. The Jumble consists of a number of lattice fills edged by surface stitching that Mary worked up from a series of doodles in her Stitch Fun series. I’m extending the number of fills sampled, and picking a lot of my own surface stitches, mostly referencing Yvette Stanton’s Left Handed Stitch Encyclopaedia. I haven’t done many surface stitches – I learnt plaited braid stitch before I learnt stem stitch, which is definitely the hard way to go about things!
The ground is cotton twill, gifted to me by Chris B. It’s a “stone” colour – headed towards yellow/grey.
I’m using Rennaissance Dying Crewel Wools which are a 1 ply, medium-> tightly twisted 1 ply vegetable dyed wool thread, with a bit of an emphasis on the Woad colours, coz I love those. All of the colours are truly gorgeous, and a couple of dollars for 25 metres, with surprisingly inexpensive postage from France. I just bought another 12 skeins and was charged about $5 postage to Australia.
1 : Large square lattice. I’m going to use this as a general background (you’ll see what I mean in the next post). I’m doing all of the lattices in 1 thread, and all of the edges in 2 threads.
2 : As per Mary’s instructions, a square lattice with french knots. It’s edged with Hungarian Braided Stitch which is a chain stitch variation and a stitch I’ve fallen in love with. Quick to work up and it creates a lovely solid braid. Then a line of stem stitch.
3 : This lattice has a version of lacing – “Squared Filling #2″ from Erica Wilson’s Embroidery Book (in the Crewel/Filling Stitches section). I cheated – where the squares where incomplete because they were at the edge of the wave shape, I pierced the ground to enable me to weave the orange wool around the partial square. I’ve edged the wave in stem stitch.
4 : Griffin Stitch (2 square lattices, one orientated to an angle to the second) – Mary says to weave the multi-threaded intersections with spider webs. I didn’t. I noticed, after I’d couched the intersections of the large squares of the lattice in red but before I got to the spiders, that the light brown-grey wool of the lattice was picking up reflections of orange and blue from the surrounding shapes. I didn’t want to interfere with that – I think it’s rather cool! That wave is edged in coral stitch with just 1 thread of wool.
5 : Laced Chain Stitch
6 : Buttonhole stitch, with 3 lines of whipping.
7 : Well, this is either upside down Raised Stem Stitch, or a line (rather than a circle) of Whipped Spider. I wanted lots of texture to balance the raised work of the lattices. This is edged in a line of purple stem stitch.
This is fun!