Session 9: Feather Stitch & Fishbone Stitch

Now we're ready to work on the feather stitch and the fishbone stitch. As you can see, the feather stitch is a really pretty, kind of almost coral looking stitch, or maybe it looks like a feather. I'm not sure why it's named that. The fishbone is a leaf-shaped stitch. So we're gonna begin with the feather stitch. You're gonna bring your fabric from the wrong side to the right, or your needle from the wrong side to the right side. Again, securing with your finger so that you have a little bit of a tail back there. Now, this is where we go. So, if you want, you can think of it as having kind of like three lines going parallel to one another up and down. I like to do mine without drawing the lines on because then, it starts to look very straight, whereas the feather stitch is supposed to be kind of a meandery shape to it. So, you're gonna take your needle and you're gonna kinda go diagonally from where that stitch began, just right over here, and then you're gonna come up kinda towards the center. It doesn't have to be directly below the stitch you did prior. It can be direct sort of off to the side, 'cause you're making sort of like little Vs that interconnect. You wanna make sure your floss is underneath your needle and pull it through. And there's our first feather stitch. So then, we're going to proceed to work, I kinda move my hoop as I go. So, when I'm working from this direction, I put my needle in slightly diagonal from that stitch, right about here, and I make sure my floss is underneath my needle, and I bring it up as such. Then I'm gonna turn my hoop this way. You can turn your hoop any way you want. Some people say you should not move your hoop, it should be stagnant as you work. But I have never really subscribed to that school of thought because sometimes it's just easier to hold it a different way. So you can see I'm doing a very meandering feather stitch here. I kind of like it that way. You can make yours nice and neat and straight. This is something, again, that heirloom quilters will use on crazy quilts and, oh, there we go, we're gonna pull it and make sure that our floss is underneath. If at any point you start pulling it through and you think, "Oh, the floss isn't underneath," just hold it gently and make sure and you can always tuck the floss under, move your needle under and capture that floss. So, we're just making a little V here. So you can see the V is the line of the floss and the line of the needle. And that's basically how you do the feather stitch. Again, I'll move my hoop around, just twisting it round and round, round and round. And we'll catch the floss underneath the needle like so, pull it under, and it pulls through. So you can see, we just create our meandering feather stitch this way. Again, if you want it to be nice and straight, at least draw maybe a center line to work from. And you can draw lines to either side to tell you put your stitch here, then put your stitch over here, et cetera. But that's the feather stitch. It's just interconnecting Vs that kinda look together at like sort of something from nature, coral or maybe a feather, depending on the bird, right? Okay, now we're ready to finish up, so we're just gonna put, we have our floss coming out of that V right there, so we're gonna put our needle here, just at the base of the V. And we're gonna pull the needle through to the wrong side, and that will finish off our feather stitch and hold it securely on the fabric. Now we're ready to work on the fishbone stitch. So, you'll need to draw on your fabric a leaf with a line down the center. On the sampler that I created, you'll see that there is a leaf with a line down the center. So you wanna trace that on there or if you're gonna print it on freezer paper, then it'll show up for you. Now, we're gonna come up right at the top here. And then, you're gonna go whatever distance you wanna do. You could go real big, you could go over here and it would just be a few quick stripes down. We're gonna go kind of narrow right there. So the second point of your needle is right kind of, not even 1/4 inch away from the first stitch and you wanna bring it up at that center line. Again, make sure your floss is underneath and pull it through. Now the next step is to go equidistant to the same distance from this mark with this stitch over here on this side. So we're gonna put our needle down just about where that's the same length and we're gonna bring our stitch up right at the base of all these stitches. So it shouldn't come through the same hole, but it should come pretty close to the same hole, just right there, kind of on the center, oh, that's not quite on the center, let's try again. Okay, right on the center like so. And here, again, you wanna make sure that your floss is underneath your stitch like that. Okay, so that's the basic feather stitch and you just keep working your way along the leaf going in on the outer edge and working towards the center line here, tucking the floss underneath as you go. Then, over here, and it should create a nice straight stitch for you. Sometimes I guess I can't stitch and talk at the same time. All right, we're gonna put the floss underneath and pull it up. You can see how these two stitches are sort of connected 'cause you're making Vs. In the fishbone stitch, the Vs are controlled and they are made to be exactly the same length. In the feather stitch, they're sort of wild and they're a little all over the place and you might catch your fabric. That looks nice and neat as you go down. Okay, so I'm gonna bring this up right towards the end. And just like we did with the feather stitch, when you're ready to finish it off, you're just gonna secure it by putting your thread right at the base there. So if this was all we wanted to do, that's what we would do. We would just put our thread there and pull it through to the side. So there you go, we have the feather stitch and the fishbone stitch. And you would wanna, of course, complete your leaf shape as you go. And that is exactly how to work those two stitches. Next up, we're going to learn about French knots and seed stitches, and those can be a little tricky, so you better stay tuned.