Hand Couching

Couching is a fun embellishment technique where you can add fibers to the front of your fabric. You can do couching on the machine using a zigzag stitch to zigzag over your fibers that you're going to be putting on the face of your fabric or you can do it by hand. It's just a little bit of a different look. So you can couch threads onto the front side of your fabric. I have embroidery floss here and yarn here. You can couch anything you want. You can couch, you know, rolled up, braided scraps of fabric, corn like this. And it's a great way to attach fibers that are too thick to go through your machine using those as embellishment on your fabric. So some of these fibers will be small enough that you'll be able to push the raw end of the fiber through to the wrong side. If you wanted to use this cord to couch onto your fabric, it would be too thick to push down to the wrong side of the fabric. But you can just not off the end like this and your end would be on the front side of the fabric but you can make that work, you can add some fray check to the end of something if you need to. So it doesn't fray, but that would stay on the right side of your fabric. And that is totally fine. But some fibers, like I said, like embroidery floss or yarn, you can push to the wrong side. So you get a nice clean look on the right side of the fabric. So the fiber that you lay down on top of the fabric is called your couched thread. And the material that you use to tack down that thread is called your couching thread. So on this one, I'm going to use yarn as my couched thread and uh embroidery floss as my couching thread. So I have just done a little script here on the face of my fabric and I'm going to take my yarn and lay it along my line that I traced. And we're using embroidery floss to go back and forth and tack down that yarn. Now to get the yarn to the, the yarn and to the wrong side of the fabric, you have to get a needle that has an eye large enough for that yarn to go through. And I'm using area a needle threader that has one large head and this small head. So we have to use the large head to go through the eye of this needle. This is a tapestry needle, hook your yarn on that hook and then just wiggle it through and then you can punch the end of that thread through at the beginning of your line. So we're gonna pull that to the wrong side and then I just removed my needle, set that aside and then you can tie a knot here if you'd like or just leave a thread tail and then on the front side of the fabric, we're just going to lay that yarn over our line. And I have six strands of embroidery floss. Here, you can use fewer strands if you want. Just gives a little bit of a different look. So I'm going to go from the wrong side and push my needle up right along the line that I have traced and I'm leaving a thread to on the back. I might tie those off later and we're just going to stitch across the yarn. So this is a great way to do monograms, do names. So I'm gonna go about a quarter inch between my stitches and I'm just stitching back and forth on each side of my couched thread and you can make your stitches tighter together further apart. When I have tight curves like this cursive e it looks nice to have your stitches a little closer together. So I'm bringing my needle up. You can go right on your traced line or you can go on either side of your traced line because your yarn or your couched thread is lying right over that line you traced. So you would keep going, curving your yarn around and tacking it down. And then at the end of whatever you have traced, take your tapestry needle again, thread it on the end of the yarn and punch it back down to the wrong side of the fabric. So on the top side of the fabric, everything is nice and smooth and you have added a little personal, unique touch to your project.