More chicken scratch

Chicken scratch has been a great first technique to experiment with in SharonB's Stitch Explorer 2009. I tried lots of variations which you can find in previous posts or on my Flickr site. Since I'm on the "tea cosy" wagon right now I decided to make a tea cosy with some chicken scratch decoration. It is the four-square design again. And this is the basic chicken scratch stitch on this square except that I have switched colours on the inner and outer rows. This is the front.


And this will be the back. Another basic stitch. This side needs another round of stitching. These designs work up really quickly and are very effective. I like the contrast of the navy and white on the pale blue gingham.

Chicken Scratch & Dotee #5

I did get the wrapping done, and of course, there was time for one more dotee!!! I'm fascinated by this "chicken scratch" embroidery on gingham, and you'll see that #5 Dotee's body is all that. But before I started her I did a bit of practice using different colour threads (all #8 perle), and using the white square on the gingham as the centre the first time, and the darkest pink square the next. I tried white, pink and darker pink threads.My favourite is the top right where I used white thread and the white square was left open.The one next to it, top middle is my second choice: white thread and the darkest pink square was left open. The two pale pink tries don't have much impact because the colour of the thread matches the colour of the pink gingham. The darker pink thread - the two samples on the right - give a nice impact too. It worked up very quickly, and I found that it was much easier and neater when I used a small hoop.