Friday, December 16, 2011

Sashico (simple is cool)

Some time ago I showed a photo with blue piece of fabric and marked square grid on it (here). And I still owe you the explanation. It's been a while I wanted to learn sashico embroidery. I bought a book that waited for good times and finally here they came :). To give you some insights - the embroidery looks very simple, after all it's "only" a running stitch that has to be made. But the beauty I find in it is how this simple stitch can be turned into sophisticated pattern. And when you combine a couple of different patterns together it is just amazing.

So, at first I chose the pattern that I thought was quite simple and tried this on the small piece of fabric that you already saw in previous post. But when trying this out it came not so simple and I managed to make one or two mistakes. So, I decided to choose even simpler pattern. I started working on this and still I managed to make one mistake. Fortunately, it is very easy to remove "wrong" threads and fix it. After that everything went well.

What is the difficulty in this? I didn't use the ready pattern (now I know they are available to buy) but worked on the square grid. So, the trick is to imagine on the grid how the pattern will look like and where the stitch will go. There are some rules to follow, like the stitch cannot cross, so you have to imagine when they will meet to make it right as well.

The fabric I'm using is the leftover from the roman shade I made for one room. I was left with enough fabric for 2 pillows, so for the second one I'll make another sashico pattern. This time I decided to make a pillow closed with buttons - but this is a story for another post, as the buttons are not so simple buttons ;).