TAST - Detached Chain Stitch

As I mentioned yesterday, Sharon chose the Detached Chain as this weeks stitch focus. I use it alot as it's one of my favorite stitches. It's so versatile! Quite often, I use it for leaves like I did on the vine to the right of the peacock:



This piece scanned a little dark today. It's much lighter and brighter in person. And very sparkly!

I decided to leave off that rose applique as I feared it would compete with the peacock. Instead, I did a stem stitch vine and used the Detached Chain (aka Lazy Daisy) stitch for leaves. The next step is to bead it. I always add either a bugle bead to the center of the leaves or 3 seed beads. If I use Petite seed beads, then I'll usually use 5 of those. I haven't decided yet on what beads to use.

The beads add sparkle, dimension and more color to the piece.

I've drawn up the motif that I used in case anyone would like to stitch it:



Click on the image to go to my Flickr site where you can download the larger version. Trace onto tissue paper, pin to your block and stitch through the tissue. Once stitching is complete, carefully remove the tissue paper. I always freehand these motifs but if you want to do an exact replica, the tissue paper should work nicely for you. For the flower, you can outline stitch it, satin stitch it or fill it in with beads.

As you can see, I did alot on this piece yesterday. I added more glass flowers to the branch and a few seed beads. I did the grape vine to the left of the peacock and I did a rose motif on the dark purple ribbon. The roses are vintage Millinary (did I spell that right?) flowers. I found a whole bagful of them awhile back but kept forgetting that I had them! I added some glass beads for a little extra sparkle and did the leaves using silk ribbons from Pat Winters. If you need silk ribbon, visit Pat's Etsy shop! Working with Pat's ribbons makes me want to do more SRE!

Looking at this from a distance, I do feel like the peacock needs a little something to make him pop out more. Maybe I should have done him in purple but I've been wanting to do a white peacock for some time now. I may take a strand of metallic silver thread and outline him with that and maybe highlight his wing with it.

I still need to add my little cat and I'm thinking of a spider web for that bottom left-hand corner. I love doing spider webs!