Take A Stitch...

Sharon from In-a-minute-ago put ot the challenge to textile artists called Take a Stitch Tuesday. The idea is to explore a different embroidery stitch each week. I'm holding off joining the challenge officially but figured that it wouldn't hurt to follow along anyway.

This challenge reminded me of an excerise in the book Stitch Magic by Jan Beaney and Jean Littlejohn which suggests that you choose a stitch and exploure it in various forms - regular/irregular, square/diagonal/round/random, etc. I have always wanted to give this a go...

So here's my challenge. I'm going to take the stitch suggested for the Take a Stitch Tuesday challenge and explore it using Jan and Jeans suggestions. To keep thins random I've put the options into a box and will choose a type (regular/irregular) and an arrangement (square/diagonal/round...) blindly.

The first TAST stitch was Herringbone. Not a stitch that I have used much but that's the challenge. Here was my task:

Herringbone Stitch - Irregular - Square

I had myself stumped for a bit - how to do a square arrangement with irregular stitches?... If the stitches were regular and even that would be easy, so I worked 'squarish' patches of the stitch and created a dense work of overlapping patches that filled my block.

So here it is....

Herringbone Stitch - Irregular - Square(ish) - 27 January 2007 - 8cm x 8cm

Close-up

Other stitches already challeged by TAST are Buttonhole, Detatched Chain and Cretan Stitch. I'll get to them soon.