Wrestling with wrapped bars

Ok, for all those family and friends who are reading this blog to follow our travels, I’ll warn you now that this is a needlework post, not a travel post! When I speak of wrestling with wrapped bars, I mean the needlework kind not the chocolate or candy kind, so you can stop imagining me sitting amongst a pile of chocolate bar wrappers…

The embroidery project that I have brought with me to work on is for an upcoming book. It has a foundation of drawn thread work with zillions of wrapped bars. Around this foundation I will eventually work other embroidery, but I am nowhere near ready to do that yet.

The wrapped bars have been bugging me a bit. They are worked in a single line of individual bars all next to each other. Rather like this: | | | | | |

Or that’s how they’d ideally be, in a perfect world…

But because they are stitched zigzagging back and forth across the drawn thread area, they instead tend to look like this: / \ / \ / \ / \

The close together ends are where the thread moves from one bar to the next. This annoys me a little. Its just not quite neat enough for me. But that’s the way it looks on the tablecloth I’m doing, and that’s the way its going to stay. I looked at the historical embroideries that I am modelling the needlework on, and they are all like mine, so it is an authentic effect.

However, I sat down with my needle and thread yesterday, determined to figure out how to make it as neat as I wanted it. I had a hunch that by lacing the thread to the far side of each bar, and then always stitching in the one direction, (rather than zigzagging) it would look better. I tried it, and it did.

For the book, I think I will also include the instructions for how to do it the neat, straight up and down way, because I’m sure there will be others like me who like theirs to be “perfect” too.