Honeycomb Tutorial Time: French Knots and Crosses

Welcome to the third installment in the Honeycomb tutorial series. In this next patch we will be covering the classic filler stitch, the humble French Knot.

I thought I would ease you into another basic stitch before I hit you with a trickier one in the next patch. I like to be nice.

Additional Items:

- Download the pattern, click here

- You will need 3 colours from your colour palette, I've chosen DMC 598, 725 and 907

- Needles - I would recommend slightly longer needles, like a number 7 embroidery, I've even been known to use darning needles. Basically anything that isn't a quilting, or between size, as it helps when it comes to wrapping the thread round the needle

- If your fabric/calico is quite thin, like mine, I recommend ironing light weight vilene on the back of the fabric. Draw on your design first if you don't have a light box as the vilene can impede being able to see the pattern. Don't forget when your drawing the design not to draw the outside line! 

Now to begin:

- With the design drawn on and the fabric nice and tight in your frame. If you need a recap, then do have a look at the first tutorial to get you on the right track. Now I am going to simply talk you through how to do a French knot, then show you some different things you can do with a French Knot to get different effects. So read the instructions first and then have a go.

Step 1: 

Bring the needle up through the fabric where you need the knot to go, and wrap the thread around the needle, the average amount to do this is 2, but you can go tiny at 1 or huge up to 5 (even bigger if your feeling daring). 

Step 2:

Keeping hold of the thread, bring the needle down close to where you brought the needle up.

Step 3:

Keep hold of the thread, as you pull the needle down through the fabric until nearly all the thread is through to the back, then let go. Then pull the rest of the thread through to the back, you should have a nice neat knot on the surface of the fabric. 

Now don't panic if the first knot you do looks messy. If your filling in an area, just stitch your next couple of knots really, close to the messy one to hide it. Don't waste your time unpicking it! Even I still make the odd messy one.

In the diagram below I've explained how many wraps and strands used for the pattern. Just to explain, though I am sure you've worked it out, strands refers to the number of threads you are working with, and wraps is the number of times to wrap the thread round the needle. 

In a couple of places, I mention mix, now this is where I have taken two colours, and used a strand of each colour. It gives a more speckled effect when stitched. There is nothing to stop you from using a mix effect throughout the entire pattern.

The crosses are a combination of long stitches and back stitch. Feel free to change the crosses into lines of French Knots.

Now to finish this honeycomb piece off, you have two options, you can do reverse applique as shown in the Eyelet Polka tutorial, or you can do a version of English Paper Piecing, which is a quilting technique as shown in Snazzy Stem. 

Once you have completed yours, I would love to see what combination of colours you use, and if you've been crazy enough to turn all the shapes into French Knots, come to Flickr to share your work or drop me a comment.

Mmmm Honeycomb

I've certainly been making the most of the evenings to get stitching done. I am switching between about four projects, the cross-stitch, mending dino, blackwork and the collar. All projects I am pleased to say are progressing a long nicely.

The cross-stitch is on a temporary pause for a few days as I need to get the dino done, who I am happy to say has a mended mouth, though he's missing his teeth and a patch of his head but he will be quite the different t-rex. Think collars, moustache, top hat....need I say more? I am seeing my nephew on Saturday and I promised I would have it ready for then. So after this blog it will be back to it.

The honeycomb/black work stitching is also coming along. Now that I have the patten well and truly licked its been pretty easy to get into the swing of stitching it. Although I will admit to going wrong in a few places so a bit of unpicking has had to occur. But as you can see from the picture below there is the start of subtle shading in both the colour and the stitch, fading now.

The aim is to get to at least the next colour in the shading by the end of the week. Which in theory could see the end of the stitching because I am still flitting between a 4" or a 6" hoop, do we'll see.

The fourth and final project for this week is the Peter Pan collar, the embroidery for both sides is complete, and its so diddy. I selected the backing fabric, worked out how its going to fastened when complete, and on the train today I stitched the two pieces of fabric together and when I got home turned it inside out. Now this is a bit of a see how it goes one, as I've never made a collar before and working out how to complete the collar for turning inside out proved interesting and this I admit isn't perhaps the easiest way of doing it but I think I can get it to work and look good.

Once I have hit this lot on the head, or as much as I can, I will be working on the next free patten sample, the next bee related item and doing something about promoting what I am doing. Because I am sure not doing as much as I should!

What you lot up too?