Advanced Embroidery: Lattice Stitch

1. Intro: Lattice Stitch: Hi, and welcome to Advanced embroidery. In this class, we're going to focus on a stitch called the threaded double Harring bone stitch, or sometimes called the lattice stitch. Hi. My name is Beca Ron, and I'm a full time teaching artist, and I use a lot of embroidery in my work, both on fabric and on paper. In many beginner embroidery classes, you do a sampler of the same kind of ten stitches. In this class, we're going to take some of those basic stitches you might have learned before, and we're going to put them together and build on top of them. These advanced embroidery stitches use the same materials that you've used for other projects. So you just need some thread, some fabric, some scissors, and a needle. This class focuses on a threaded double herring bone stitch, which is kind of a mouthful. It builds on a basic herring bone stitch. We double it up, and then we twist a contrast and colored thread through it. So it makes this complex kind of border that looks like more than the sum of its parts. If you're ready to challenge yourself to some more complex stitching, join me in the next lesson, and we'll start making a threaded double herring bone. 2. Project & Materials: Your project for this class is to just make a sample. The best way to learn these stitches is to just practice. So that's what I want you to do. Anything you want to stitch, take a picture of it really close up and post it in the project section for this class. So we can all see all of the different variations, depending on the colors and the sizes you choose for this stitch. So the materials you'll need to stitch your sample, starting out with a needle. My favorite needle for doing these sort of stitches is a Chanel needle, and I'm holding it up close to the camera there. Chanel needles have a large eye and a sharp point, so they're easy to thread, and they work really well for doing embroidery. C find chinle needles in the craft section of your favorite craft store with the other sewing needles and embroidery needles. You'll need a pair of scissors for trimming your threads. Then you get to choose the thread you stitch this stitch with. I think the double threaded herringbone stitch or the lattice stitch looks the best with two colors. This is a fun time to experiment with combining colors to make a really cool stitch. You can use a bunch of different kind of thread for this class, and I'll talk about the pros and cons for each one. The most common is a six stranded embroidery thread, and I've definitely stitched a few of the samples here with this thread. These weren't great. For this stitch, you can use nearly any combination of thickness of this thread. You can split this apart into three or six different strands, and you can experiment with different weights of this thread to do the different parts of the stitch. So, six stranded embroidery thread is a great option. Most of the samples I stitched using pearl cotton. This is a size eight pearl cotton, which is a small one. It also comes in a size five and size three pretty commonly, and those are just thicker versions of the same thread. I love this one because you use it all as one strand. I think it makes this stitch look a little bit sharper, a little more distinct when you use this thread that's a single strand versus the six stranded embroidery thread. That's just a personal preference. The pro cotton comes in solid colors like this. You could try it with a variegated color, and several of my samples I stitched up with a variegated color. We'll talk about those. You also could try a novelty thread, a more advanced thread, if you want to. I've got two great examples here. This is a thread called dazzle, which is ron and metallic. That one is slippery. It is a little bit more challenging to stitch with. The same thing would be true of like a silk thread. Then this one is called an eco Vita. This one is made from wool. This is a wool embroidery thread. This would also work great for this stitch. We've got our needle and thread. The next choice to make is the kind of fabric you're going to stitch on. This one, I honestly think is the easiest to stitch on something like this top fabric here. This is an even weave linen. It's made to be an embroidery fabric, and I find it in my fabric store in the section with the crosstitch fabric and those kind of things. It's got a little stiffness to it, so it's really easy to stitch without a hoop. That's my preference. I really don't like stitching with an embroidery hoop. I like using a fabric where I can have a little bit more feel for the stitches than having it pulled really tight in a hoop. Personal preference, you can absolutely use a hoop if you're more comfortable with that. For this stitch, I think it's helpful to draw some guidelines and that is easiest to do on a smooth woven fabric like this. But If you like to stitch a little bit more free form, then my favorite stitching fabric for learning embroidery stitches is actually this wool and rayon blend felt. The reason I like felt is because it's got a little bit of thickness and so it helps with the tension of your stitches. It's really hard to pull it too tight when you're working in felt because of the thickness of the fabric. Two good options, you can choose whichever one makes the most sense to you. I think for this particular stitch, it is really helpful to have a marking pen of some sort. The ones I like are called friction by pilot, and this is a heat sensitive inc. And so I can draw on my fabric, and then when I'm done stitching, I can either iron the backside of it or I can use my hair dryer on a hot setting, and when the heat hits this ink, it'll make it disappear. So I can draw all the guidelines I need and then make them disappear at the end. For this stitch, I would recommend having some a marking pen. All right. That's all of the materials you need to get started. I want to hold up my samples a little bit closer to the camera and so we can talk through some of the design choices here. If we start at the top, that one is stitched with six snded embroidery thread, and I think it looks a little bit messier than some of the other versions. The rest on this page are stitched with pearl cotton, and I think this particular stitch works the best in pearl cotton. So I've done a small version is the second stitch down there and the threading section I did with a variegated color. You can see how the color changes across the stitches. That's fun. So it's a solid color underneath and then a variegated color. Same thing with the next sample that's actually stitched in exactly the same two threads. I just made the stitches bigger. You can see how if you spread it out, you get a different variation. Then there's a variation done in two very similar colored threads, a green and a blue, kind of an equal value. And then the bottom one has got a little bit of a metallic thread in it. I don't know if you can see a little sparkle in it, it's a navy blue and then a red on top of it. So we'll talk a little more about these variations at the very end. But if that helps you kind of think about what colors you might want to combine to make this stitch before we go on to the next lesson and start our stitching. 3. Stitching Lattice Stitch: So the threaded double herring bone stitch is based on a basic stitch that you might be familiar with, which is the herring bone stitch. So we're going to start out stitching a row of just plain basic herringbone stitch. Then we're going to turn it into a double herring bone, which means we go back and do another set of herring bone stitches kind of in the gaps between stitches. Then the last pass we make, we're going to change colors, and we're going to do a threading pattern where we're actually taking a thread and slipping it under parts of the stitches, but not stitching through the actual fabric. When you combine all of these things together, it becomes the threaded double arring bone stitch, or sometimes this one is called the lattice stitch. Your first thing is to make some color choices. This is going to work in two colors. At least I think the stitch looks best in two colors. I decided I'm going to do mine in a black for my arring bone stitches, and then I'm going to use this rainbow e variegated to do the threaded part of my stitch. You want to pick out two. You can either choose ones that have a lot of contrast like mine, or you can choose two that are very similar to each other, and that'll make a very different look. I'm going to set those aside for now. This stitch, I think it's actually the most helpful to draw yourself some guidelines. Herring bone stitch is I think really difficult to stitch evenly and uniformly if you're just free forming it. Here's the way that I draw out guidelines for my own stitches. I've got my erasable pen, the heat erasable pen, and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to draw one straight line. You could use a ruler or a straight edge for this if you want to. Because I can see the threads on this fabric pretty easily, I just follow along one of those thread lines. I've got a straight line going across. Now I'm going to make a line parallel to this and this is going to be the width of this band of stitches. I'm going to make this one big because I want it to be easy for you guys to see on camera. I'm going to draw this about a half an inch away and I'm just going to make another line that's about the same distance away. Mine look like they get a little bit narrower at the other end and I'm not going to worry about this because we are learning this stitch. I've got two parallel lines. Now what I do is I draw a series of vertical lines so that I'm making squares. Here's what I mean. I'm going to put one almost at the edge here, and then I'm going to draw a line over and I'm going to go over about the same width as these two lines are apart so that I'm making pretty much a square. I'm just going to keep Go down, making squares. Again, if you are more comfortable using a ruler or a straight edge, instead of just eyeballing this, you are absolutely welcome to do that. But I'm going with the eye ball at method. This ends up looking like a ladder. That's the shape, and I think this is really helpful for doing my foundation of hearing bone stitches. I'll be able to hit this with the iron or my hair dryer at the end and that'll erase those marks and so we'll never know that those are there. Now that I've got my marking in, I'm going to grab a piece of thread that is in my foundation color. This will be the color that's underneath all of the stitches. I'm going to do this in black. This is an advanced class, so I'm not going to go real deep into basic herring bone stitch. I'm going to assume you've done a little bit before. But we're going to start out by doing just a herringbone stitch all the way down this ladder stripe that I drew in. I'm going to start by hearing bone stitch down at this end. I'm going to bring my needle up just below that bar that's going across, my horizontal line here. I'm going just below that. Then the way I use my markings to make herringbone stitch is I'm going to make the next stitch on the right hand side, and I'm basically going to center that guideline I made in between where I put my needle for this next part of the stitch. When I stitch hearing bone, I'm going to make a little stitch and I'm going just above that line, the horizontal line, and just below it. I'll just bring this up close so you can see. So I've centered my horizontal line in between where I've brought my needle down and up, and you'll notice the needle is pointing back towards me. Then I'm going to pull that through. That makes one diagonal stitch. Now the next herring bone stitch or the next part of the hearring bone stitch, I'm going to switch over to the left hand side, and I'm going to do that same thing on the next horizontal bar. I'm going to bring my needle down just above it and out again just below it. Again, needle pointing back towards me. And we're starting to get the little criss cross of a herring bone stitch. So I'm going to continue that way all the way down my ladder, my marks. So I'm going to go to the right side. Down and up. Move my thread out of the way. Pull that one. I skip up to the next one. You're only ever stitching in one end of these stitches right now, these horizontal marks. So the next stitch. We're making really whoops, I went into the wrong one. We're making really big herring bones here because we're going to come back and do another row of herring bone stitch right in between these. I want big stitches. I almost skipped up too far again. Trying to skip over a horizontal line. Above and below. I want to make sure that I have enough that I can see like the little gap. Here that my two ends of the stitch aren't too close together. Okay. And I'll finish up here with one more. Okay. And then I'm just going to finish this by coming back over to the right side and stitching down. Okay. So there's one row of nice herring bone stitches. I'm going to tie off my thread. Okay. So that's the very first row basic stitches. Hopefully, you've done a little bit of herring bone stitch before. Okay. I have tied a knot. On the back side. Okay. Now, we're going to make this double hearring bone stitch. What that means is, we're going to come back and do another row of exactly the same stitch, exactly the same herring bone, but we're going to alternate it the other direction. So where this one went to the right first, our next line of stitches is going to go to the left first, and it's basically going to stitch in the gaps between our first row of stitches, alternating back and forth. Okay. So I'm going to start it now, my last one started on the left side. I'm going to start this one on the right side. Oops. I pulled my knot through. Try that again. Okay. So now I'm going to do my first stitch over here to the left, and I'm going to go using the same guidelines, the same way. We're kind of mirroring what we did before. There's my first stitch. Now, one little variation we do when we do the double herring bone stitch is before I stitch this next one on the right side, every time I go to the right, I'm going to first slip my needle underneath that stitch going across. This is helping to just weave the stitches together a little bit. I go under that one going across and now I make the rest of the herring bone stitch just like normal. I stitch back towards myself. I don't slip under when I'm going towards the left. I just do this one as regular. I caught on my fabric there. Now I'm going to slip under before I go right. Finish my herring bone. No slip on the left. Slip under going towards the right. Ops. I almost forgot. Slip under going towards the right. No slip going towards the left. Okay. And I'm just going to do the same thing. I'll just stitch this over to the other side to finish it. All right. And I'm going to tie a nut. So I have that end of the stitches also finished off. All right. That is now a double hearing bone stitch. Which is actually a really cool stitch all by itself. That's got two together. This one's actually really pretty if you stitch those two passes in two different colors and all that. At this point, you could erase your marking lines because we have everything we need from those. You could take a hot hair dryer to these or iron on the back side so that you're not squashing your stitches. I'm just going to leave the marks for now and take them out at the very end because I don't want to take the time to go and do that. The last pass or I guess, the last two passes is going to be the threaded part of the stitch. We actually want two switch colors. I am going to grab some of my variegated thread. I think this will be really fun because the color is going to change as we stitch this. I'm going to thread, my needle. And tie it up. All right. We're going to work the threaded section of the stitch in two passes. I'm going to work first on the bottom half of the stitches and I'm going to go across the bottom edge, and then we're going to turn around and go across the top edge. I'm going to bring my thread up in the same place that my herringbone stitch started. So in that same hole. Now we're going to slip this contrasting color thread underneath each one of the stitches, but it depends on which direction the stitch is leaning, which way we move the needle. We're going to look at each stitch one at a time. What I want you to do is we're going to work from the left to the right and I want you to look at the direction the stitch is going. If the stitch is going up. If I look at this very first stitch, my thread is pointing up. As I'm going left to right. If it's going up, my needle is going to go through the stitch facing up. From bottom to top. I'm going to slip first underneath this first stitch, going from bottom to top or going up with my needle. I'm just slipping under the thread and pulling through. It's just going to twist around, that's perfect for this first one. Now we look at the next thread we come to. The next thread is right here. And that one, as we're going left to right, is facing down. Now we're going to take the needle and we're going to slip underneath that one right here in the center, you go in through the diamond shape here, and the needle is facing down or towards me. So if the stitch slants down, the needle points down. You can see that's going to make this cool little loop that goes right over the x part of the stitch. I'm just pulling that tight enough so the loop lays down. So it's not slipping all the way to the bottom or anything like that. We're just kind of getting it so it lays just gently across those other stitches. Okay. Now we move to the next stitch. The next stitch is this one right here. And it's pointing up. It's slanting up, so we're going to slip under that one with the needle pointing up or away from me. And again, I'm slipping underneath this part of the stitch, kind of the center of it, and my needle is coming out in that kind of diamond shape in the middle of that. Okay. Pull that one through. And that's now made kind of a loop around that bottom x. Now I just continue working my way across. The next stitch we're going to look at is this one right here. That slanting down. So my needle goes down in the center of the diamond and kind of out between the stitches. The next stitch is going up. So I'm going to slip underneath that part of the stitch with my needle pointing up. This is just alternating up down, up down, but I always find it easier to kind of analyze where I am in the stitch. That way, if I put it down and I look away, and I come back, I'm like, Oh, no, where was I? Now I can look and see, Okay, I went under this one last, so this is my next stitch, and it's slanting down, so my needle goes down. Next stitch goes up, M needle goes up. And I'm just going to continue my way all the way across the bottom half of those stitches. Needle goes down next, and then up. And down. And this is a fun part of using a variegated color. If you have one, you can see my my stitches started out kind of tie. Then they turned orange. And now we're pink. Okay. I've got one more stitch here to slip underneath. Okay. And then I'm going to just finish off this by going down again, like we started by just going into the same hole where that stitch started. Okay. Now I'm going to hold this up close to the camera so you can see. So now we've got this little way line that's going in the bottom half of all of those stitches that we made, those hearing bones. Okay. Now I'm going to go back the other direction and do the top half of the stitches. And this is one where again, I find it's easiest to do if I just spin my piece around so that I'm working the same way I was before. I'm working in the bottom half of the stitches. I just like to make it repetitive like that, so I'm doing the same thing. Now I'm just going to make a stitch over so that I'm coming up again, right at where the underlying stitch, the herring bone stitches started. And we're doing the same exact pattern. So our first stitch is going up as we are it's leaning towards up, so my needle goes up under that first stitch. Okay? And then down. In the next one. Now, you might not start going up. This is a good reason for you to pay attention to the shape of your stitches. You might have started and ended your arring bone rose differently than mine. Your stitch might be lying a different direction than mine does. You have to look at your stitch and what direction it's going and that will tell you which way the needle is going to go underneath it. Okay. So I'm continuing across, and you'll see this is making a mirror image of the row that we did before. So there'll actually be kind of two stitches sitting across the center that lie side by side, and then there's one out on kind of the cross part of each one of the herring bones. And I'm finishing that off the same way, just going back down right in line with my herringbone stitch. That is the two lines of threading. I'm going to quick take this over to my iron and just erase away the guidelines that I drew in. Then I will come back so we can look at this up close as our finished stitch. There is our finished row of threaded double hearring bone stitch. In the next lesson, I'm going to talk about some of the variations that I've stitched and ways that you can use this stitch, so you can try all kinds of experiments on your own. 4. Variations & Wrap up: Alright, let's talk about the differences in these different versions of the threaded double hearing button stitch. So, as I mentioned before, this first version is stitched in six stranded embroidery thread. And I didn't mark out guidelines on it. So you can see, my stitches are a little bit wobbly. I don't think that one's the most awesome example, but I wanted to show that like, it still looks interesting, and you might be able to do cool things with it, even if you don't mark out the stitches. The next two variations are exactly the same colors. It's a dark forest green as the foundation as the Harring bone stitches, and then a variegated thread that's pink and purple and orange. Now I stitch them exactly the same. So that it's the dark color in the background and the bright variegated one doing the threading. You can see how different it looks when you change the size of the stitches. The Harring bone stitches on the top one are a row that's about a quarter of an inch wide. The ones on the bottom are about a half an inch wide. When I put them closer together, you see more of the threading color and less of the foundation color. It's cool variation. I also made the stitches here a little bit closer together. Instead of drawing squares, I drew a little bit more rectangles. I did the same thing here with this version. This one is two shades of color that are very similar to one another, there's not as much contrast there. I made these herring bone stitches taller and narrower. Instead of drawing guidelines that looked like squares, I drew ones that were more of a tall rectangle. That also changes. You see a little bit more of the thorn shapes sticking out on the edge of this one versus say this variation up here, where they're a little bit more square. The last one, I used a novelty, a special thread. You might be able to see on camera just a little bit of sparkle. The thread that is doing the threading part is a much heavier thread that has a little bit of metallic in it. And so that gives a different look. It doesn't pick up the sparkle very much on camera, but that's a really fun decorative stitch. You could try all kinds of other variations on this as well. This is another stitch that would look really cool if you stitched a bead in the center of each of these openings that would give it another look completely. I'll try to stitch up a sample of that and put it in the project section for this class. Hopefully, you have some ideas. You want to try some different color variations with this stitch. Don't forget to take a picture of your sample that you've been stitching. Get really nice and close up so we can see all of your stitches and post that in the project section for this class. If you stitch it in a really heavy or metallic thread, it looks great on things like holiday decorations. You can use it on home decor and match pieces of furniture or other decorations in your house. As the edges of napkins or pillow cases, all kinds of things like that. I also think this one is great for stitching on clothing or even costumes. When you want something that looks like a really elaborate embroidered trim. You can stitch this in, you know, colored threads, shiny threads, add beads into the stitches as you're stitching or in between, and make it look like you've got really rich trim on your costume or your cos play. So, I hope you've enjoyed stitching the threaded double hearing bone stitch. And you'll come back and try some more variations on advanced embroidery stitches with me and another class.