Silk Ribbon Embroidery Supplies and Stitches

Before you do any silk ribbon embroidery (SRE) you need supplies. The photo above shows several brands of silk ribbon and also shows a packet of chenille needles. Stitching with silk ribbon needs a needle with a large eye and a sharp point, and chenille needles are perfect on both counts.

Silk ribbon for embroidery comes mostly in 4 mm widths although 2 mm and 7 mm widths are available. I don't have any 2 mm in my stash but the card of variegated yellow ribbon in the photo is 7 mm wide. For 18 count canvas like my example, 4 mm works just fine, although if I were doing a large and elaborate piece, I would want some 2 mm for buds and other small areas. I actually used a card of variegated purple Splendor Silk Ribbon from Rainbow Galley. It's not in the photo. I didn't think to take the picture until after the wisteria was all done. The card held 4 yards of ribbon and I used it all and needed to finish my wisteria with some of the Bucilla pale lavender ribbon you see in the picture. Brands of ribbons matter. Some are stiffer than others. I like the crisp curl the stiffer Bucilla ribbon gave to my wisteria blossoms, although the Splendor silk ribbon looks just as good. I haven't used the River Silks ribbon yet, although folks rave about it, and I haven't used the Gloriana silk ribbon yet, either, although I love the depth of color. Whatever brand you use, keep in mind that the two wisteria clusters which are each around 3/4 inch wide and 2 inches long, took more than 4 yards of ribbon. Make sure you buy enough ribbon. SRE does use a lot of ribbon.


Now let's talk about the stitches I used. I had taken a careful look at the Lee wisteria kimonos Ruth Dilts and Joan Lohr stitched and taught Judie at Thistle Needleworks, and already knew that they used mostly Japanese ribbon stitch. To do this stitch, you come up through your ground fabric (NP canvas in our case) and then lay your ribbon flat on the surface and plunge your needle down at the point you want your stitch to end. This is why you need a sharp needle--you use it to stitch right through the ribbon! You get a long stitch with a very pretty curl at the end. Here's a good diagram.
http://www.stitching.com/CDA/stitch/stitches/ribbon-stitch.html

I looked at various ribbon stitches and did some test stitching and decided I wanted to mostly use a lazy daisy stitch for my wisteria. If you look at the stitches on the left of the canvas you see a lazy daisy stitch done in dark purple as a sort of horseshoe shape. Instead of starting and ending my lazy daisy stitch loop in the same hole, I spaced the starting and stopping holes apart to make the horseshoe which I tied down as you normally tie down lazy daisy stitches.
http://crochet.about.com/library/weekly/aalazydaisy.htm

If you look back at photos of the teapot from yesterday with the wisteria partly stitched, you'll see the blossoms were painted as shaded ovals of various lengths and widths. Working from the bottom of the spray of flowers to the top, I made a lazy daisy horseshoe that fit an oval. If the oval was wide, I put a smaller lazy daisy horseshoe inside the first horseshoe. Then I finished the flower by doing the Japanese embroidery stitch in the middle of the horseshoe's empty shape. I always came up at the top of the horseshoe right under the tie down stitch and went down at the bottom between the horseshoe legs so that the curl of the stitch was at the bottom. In my sample on the canvas's left side, the horseshoe lazy daisy stitch is in dark purple and the Japanese embroidery stitch that fills the middle is in pale lavender. I hope you can see the little curl where I put the needle right through the ribbon at the bottom.

Occasionally I did a French knot in ribbon if I needed to fill a space that my other stitches didn't cover. I also put a few single Japanese embroidery stitches here and there in the very small oval areas. It didn't take long (although it took a lot of ribbon) and the only hard part was keeping the ribbon from twisting. It was pretty well behaved most of the time but it is easy not to pull your ribbon all the way snug if you aren't careful. I cut out the lighter areas of the overdyed Splendor silk ribbon to use mostly on the left spray of flowers and put most of the darker areas of the overdyed ribbon on the right side. I thought that looked better, but really I could have let the colors fall naturally if I wanted.

I like how this turned out and learned a great deal about SRE that I hope to put to good use on two other pieces I have in my stash that will benefit from silk ribbons. The next area is the latticework which as you see I've padded with long stitches of DMC white cotton perle that I'm overlaying with 4 plies of my white Gloriana silk. I am not sure that I have the stitches the proper length in some areas that I had to compensate so I'll be studying this and thinking it over for a while.

Meanwhile the sun is supposed to be out today and perhaps that means my finishing of the pet guardian angels can continue. Wish me luck on both projects, ok?

Jane/Chilly Hollow
Main blog at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow