Session 10: French Knots & Seed Stitches

I'm going to teach you the French knot and the seedling stitch. It took me years to learn the French knot. You can see they are essentially just knots on the right side of your fabric. There're a great decorative filling stitch. So if you have a block you want to fill in with stitches, you can do them spaced however you want. On our sampler they're sort of like polka dots, variegated polka dots, and they look pretty cool. I've seen people that create their initial, and so for me, it would be a J, and then they fill it in with just dense, dense French knots, and it's very textural and it feels cool and it looks really neat. So the French knot is a very versatile stitch. That said, it is a little bit hard to get the hang of and you're just gonna have to try it over and over again until you get it right. So as with all our stitches, we're gonna bring our needle up wrong side to right side and we're gonna hold onto it back here. And then this is the part, so ideally I'd be holding onto it but I want to show you kind of slowly what we're gonna do. So we're gonna bring our needle in, we're gonna wrap the floss around it three times, oop, three times and we're not gonna let it get away. Then bring that up real tight, tighten it up and make sure you're not pulling all your floss out on the wrong side, which you might be doing. So it's a good idea at that point to hold onto it back there. Now pull it all together so that it's one thick jumble on your needle, put your needle right close to where you brought your needle up, and then you can see the knot is already forming on the bottom there. We're just gonna push the needle through. This is a very good time to hold onto your floss on the right side of the fabric. And there you go. We've created a little knot. So let me show you that again. On the backside you do want to try and capture the floss as you come back up. So come up a little ways away or wherever your pattern designates your knots should be. So bring that up to the right side. And bringing it up actually secures that first knot even better. And then we're going to sew. This is how you would do this while holding your floss on the backside. And you would just bring your needle kind of down from where you came up and wrap it around like so. And then let those stitches bunch up on your needle. Ope! Or you might accidentally let go of what you're doing. And then, so we're gonna wrap it around like so, bring those stitches all right together and put your needle right in next to where it came out of the fabric. And if you can feel the knot forming as you do this, you know you've done it right. There you go, we have another knot. So this one's sort of tricky. It took me a while to figure out. I used to try and do fake French knots where I would tie a knot on the end and then just pull it through to the wrong side and tie it off on the backside and come back up and tie it off on the end. That is not how you have to do it. This is actually not that hard. And you can, you can master it in no time at all. It's always important to remember to do kind of three loops and then push it in, make sure it's nice and taut. This is a time when having one of those fancy schmancy hoops that sits up off the table for you is kind of nice because it would sit right here and you could work on it at that level. But if you don't have that, that's okay. I don't have one of those. They're kind of expensive. So we're gonna do a couple more just to make sure you get it down. So wrap the thread or the floss three times around, put your needle back in very close to where it came from, and then down it goes. And you can feel it tightening up as you pull it. That's a good sign. That means that the knot is getting tight and thick. And the more you do it, the better you'll get at it. So there you go, those are our French knots. And my needle has come unthread, so I'm just gonna thread it again real quick so that we can do maybe a few more French knots or we could move on to the seed stitch. As I said, these are great stitches for filling in an area. If you're, you know, crazy quilting, you could make one patch that's a plain color and then do some French knots in a metallic floss, or in a, any color you want, just something that's gonna pop on top of the fabric. So I'm gonna wrap three times, three is the magic number. Put my needle really close but not in the same hole. And pull it to the wrong side. So there you go. At that point, then you would secure on the back by stitching under the little links between the stitches. So you would kind of go like so and weave it all together so that the knots stay secure and that would secure your floss. As you can see, I cheated earlier and I jumped. It's the wrong side of my fabric. It's not as beautiful as the right side. Okay, so the seed stitch, or as I've written here, the seedling stitch, they both have, it's sort of interchangeable there. It's just whatever sounds like seed and stitch, that's this stitch. This, too, was a filler stitch. Oh, oh my. I've come and flossed. Let's see if we can do it the old-fashioned way with a little bit of spit. There we go. Okay, so the seedling stitch is also a fun way to stitch out a filler stitch. I'm gonna secure that back there. It's just two sets of parallels together. You can see they kind of all look like little equal signs. So I'm gonna put my needle here and then come up right above where I did the previous stitch, and then move my needle to wherever I want my next stitch to appear. And they're supposed to be kind of random. So there you go, that's your first seedling stitch, two lines right together. So I go straight across, so maybe this one should be vertical in comparison to the other one, so I go down, I bring it up very near where that other stitch is, and then I put it down right there matching where this one ended with my seedling stitch, and I just kind of pop my needle over to where I want the next one to be. It's good to kind of just keep it varied and loose. Sometimes they're gonna make more of a V than they'll create a equal sign, which is totally fine. It's kind of a, it's sort of a old-fashioned stitch that's fun to make and easy to do and great for filling in any sort of blocks of fabric with some personal touches. So I'm gonna put that there and then I just bring my needle up right above where that stitch began. And I go down in right where, above where the other stitch ended, the first stitch I completed. And we'll do one more, just so you get the gist of it. I like to spread mine out and then go back in and fill in areas as I'm working. So we'll go here and there. Ooh, but don't tuck your floss underneath. That's a no-no. One more stitch and we will say we're finishing this off. So you just pull it to the wrong side. And as we did with the French stitch, weave your needle underneath all the connecting flosses. And that is the seedling stitch and the French knot. Those are excellent stitches to use when you are practicing your embroidery. Be sure to use them on your sampler in the boxes provided and I think it'll turn out great when you're finished. Next up, we're going to work on the satin stitch and the brick stitch, which will be very fun, so be sure to stay tuned.