Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Summer Bloggin' - New to Chicken Scratch

Summer Bloggin' on &Stitches

We don't know about you, but we just can't get enough of chicken scratch, so here is another post about this delightful type of stitching. Michelle is completely new to it and in this post she shares her experience of trying it. The result is rather lovely, we think!

My name is Michelle and I'm here to say, I like to do embroidery in a major way!

Blog: Mooshie Stitch
Flickr: moshee

Chicken scratch embroidery was unknown to me. I had heard the term before, but had no clue what stitches where used or even that it was stitched on gingham fabric.

At first when I started researching it, I have to admit, it seemed kind of confusing. There is more to know than I thought – dark floss on white squares, white floss on dark squares, running stitch on shaded squares, etc.

The only stitch I was familiar with was running stitch. So I practiced on some double cross stitch and woven circles.


I decided to use black gingham and first started stitching with black thread, but I couldn’t really see the stitches against the fabric. (I guess the whole “white floss on dark squares” makes sense!) So I switched to white thread with some blue.

At this point I was still unsure how I wanted to continue…


The white woven circle (lacing) stitches are 4 strands of floss. The blue and white double cross stitches are 3 strands of floss.


I decided to create sort of a rectangle design and then fill up the remainder space with running stitches.



A few things I discovered as a newbie to chicken scratch:

The double cross stitches look better if worked the same direction for each one.

The lacing stitch was more time consuming to do than I thought it would be! I was reading on various sites to circle around twice and at first I didn’t want to bother, but I decided they do look nicer that way.

Thank you for opportunity to guest post and challenging me to chicken scratch embroidery. It was fun to learn new stitches and a new embroidery technique, which is something I definitely need to do more often!

2 comments:

  1. i can remember at least I think I can this being popular in Australia a few years ago, it does not seem to have caught on here in the UK. Yours looks very nice, not usually a blue person but the blue one is great

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is fun to do! My mother did this years ago in Australia and made me wear it. Not my best moment!

    ReplyDelete

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