TAST week 17: wheatear stitch

English name: Wheatear stitch
Swedish name: veteaxsöm?

Last week the challenge stitch was wheatear, a stitch I hadn't tried before. To be honest I wasn't that impressed with it -- ok, but nothing more -- not until I begun adding beads to it! I also tried whipping the stitches (with and without beads), which I thought looked good. So in the end it turned out to be a stitch I'd love to use in the future. With beads.

I first did a few detached stitches with two or three straight stitches (above, left) and then continued by making a few horisontal rows of stitches. For the dark green horisontal row I whipped the straight stitches. For the blue roes, I added a second row of stitches above the first one.

Then I began doing the vertical chains. First just trying out different lenghts of the loops and then, below it, I tried whipping the loops. The remaining green rows are beaded, though it can be hard to see as I did most of them with frosted dark green beads. So let's look closer a bit closer at those.

The beaded variations are the ones I'm most pleased with. I tried several different onces and here's a summary of them:

1. With one bead on each straight stitch
2. As above, but afterwards beads were back stitched into the loops, one bead per loop
3. Detached stitch with one bead on each of the three straight stitches
4. Whipped with one bead per whipping stitch
5. Whipped with beads on the straight stitches
6. Whipped with beads on both whipping and straight stitches
7. One bead on each side of the loop
8. Longer stitches with multiple beads in each loop
9. Loop enters from and exit in one bead
10. As no. 1, but with longer loops
11. As no. 9 but with beads on the straight stitches too
12. As no. 7, but with longer loops

The last two rows with sand coloured beads are made to show the difference between using tone-in-tone beads and beads in a contrasting colour. Variations used are no. 9, 12, 11 and -- in the last row -- 10.

Of cause I also tried the Aurica yarn, but this stitch is a bit too complex to use with only the aurica if you want even results. Detached stitches work better than rows. I tried making rows of stitches, but it was so bad I ripped it up.

So it wasn't a good stitch for my novelty yarn, but again I must say it was a very good stitch for beads. I makes for lovely beaded borders so I'm glad I tried this stitch!

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What is TAST?

Take a Stitch Tuesday is a weekly embroidery challenge throughout the year by Sharon of Pin Tangle. You can read more about it here (or by clicking the TAST badge to the right).


To see what others have done in this stitch, check out the comments in this post on Pin Tangle. Be sure not to miss Sharon's lovely stitch variations in the actual post.