Session 6: Blanket Stitch & Varied Length Stitch

All right, now we're going to learn about the blanket stitch and varied lengths of the blanket stitch, which can make two very different looks. With this, I think it's best to go ahead and create two sets of markings for where you want your stitches to end and begin. This is also a great stitch to do on the edge of any sort of fabric. You would wanna keep this edge right here where you see the stitches running together right on the edge, I suppose you could do it either way, but that's traditionally where it's done. You come up right on the edge of the fabric and you stitch in and it just has this nice little thread right along as you run. So, we're gonna bring our needle up right at the beginning of this row here. And again, pull until you have about two inches left on the wrong side. And now, it helps to hold your fabric so that you have your lines running horizontal. And then, all you do is you put your needle in on the top row, you bring your needle out on the bottom row, and then make sure that this thread right here is underneath the needle. That's the trick to the blanket stitch. So make sure that that runs right underneath there and then pull that up like so. Now, on the back side, you wanna try and catch those stitches as you're starting out. And then just in case you miss one, you can always go back here, tuck, pull up the most recent stitch 'cause it'll be loose, pull your floss underneath it, and then tighten that down and hold it in place. So, that's how we get started. So, we have our blanket stitch one done. Now we're gonna work our way down this chain as we go. You can hold it, I said you could do it horizontally. I suppose I also do it vertically. Either is fine, whatever you're most comfortable with. So start on the outer row and work across to the inner row. You can see I'm tucking my needle in right on that row there. I'm bringing my needle up right on the other row, and then I'm making sure the floss is underneath the needle. And it catches it and forms your blanket stitch. So, that's pretty clear. It's not a super hard stitch to do. It's a pretty common stitch, makes these fun rows. You can use it in any form. A lot of heirloom stitchers like to use these blanket stitches on their crazy quilts. Most of the stitches we're doing today are frequently used on crazy quilts. So you can use this blanket one to decorate whatever you want. Now on your sampler, you'll see that there is a box for blanket stitches and there are two lines on it. Those two lines correspond with the two lines I'm using, so there you go. That's pretty easy peasy. Now, the way you finish a blanket stitch is you're gonna take your needle and you're gonna actually put it in right past, but not, you don't wanna do like too far down, because that's another stitch. I mean, if you prefer that look, you can definitely do that and it would have a tail on the end like this. But in general, you wanna put it down right underneath that last stitch and pull it to the wrong side. And that secures your blanket stitches to the fabric. And now we're ready to go over and try varied lengths blanket stitches. So you can see it looks a little bit like a bar graph or maybe a thermometer. It has a lotta stitches, a lotta different lengths. For this one, I just put on a set of four different lines. Each one is about 1/4 of an inch apart, maybe a little less. And the first line is gonna be our solid line, just like this, and then we're gonna use those other lines as reference points to take our stitches to as we go. So, again, you wanna finish off your stitch. The proper way to do this is to just wind it right underneath those stitches there. But this time, I'm gonna jump right over there. I'm gonna do what you're not supposed to do. I'm gonna make the back of my fabric messy. Oh, actually, I'm not gonna start there. I'm gonna start here. So, come right up there. You're gonna form your first stitch and it's gonna be, you can start on any line. You can decide what your pattern's gonna be. Here, it kinda goes small, medium, large, medium, small, medium, large, right? You could do small, large, small, medium. You could do really variegated and just try to make it random. But I think it looks nice when it goes in order of height. So just as I was doing before, I put my needle in at the first line, I bring it out at the second line. I catch that floss underneath like so. And then I proceed to do the next stitch, which I do on the next line over, so that that creates a medium length stitch. And then, I proceed to the large length. As you can see, all of this is being worked on the right side of the fabric. Almost every embroidery stitch is completed on the right side of the fabric, but they're done in such a way that the wrong side of the fabric still looks nice as well. You may have heard the saying, it should be as nice on the back as it is on the front. Well, that's not necessarily always true, but it is nice to keep it neat and tidy back there and make your stitches as nice and neat as possible. You wanna try and keep your stitches the same length apart as you work your way down. So you can see, I've now gone small, medium, large, medium, small, medium, large. And if I was ready to finish off, I would just pop this needle right next to but on the other side of the thread of the large stitch, right there. I just pop it in and it's gonna secure that stitch for me, and then I would finish it up on the back by weaving it underneath the other stitches as we covered in the previous section. So, that is the blanket stitch with varied lengths to create a different approach and different look. You'll find that on your sampler in the boxes. The blanket stitch has only two lines. The varied length one has more than two lines. It has three or four. And you wanna stitch it through and make it look as nice and neat as you can. This is a great stitch to use a variegated thread on because you're gonna see all the different colors as they come up, and your stitches are actually pretty close together. So you can, they, it flows nicely and you can see all the different shades that are on that variegated thread. So I would recommend that. Now, stay tuned, we're gonna learn another stitch coming up next.