The Long and The Short Of It, Day 1

This weekend's class with Marion Scoular is a shading class called The Long and The Short Of It. This piece is small; only about 5" across. Today we covered satin stitch over a split stitch outline, satin stitch leaves with a center vein, and regular long-and-short stitch. As shown in the photo, in class today, I finished 4-1/2 leaves and one flower bud. Tonight I'm going to continue to work on the leaves.

In addition to the stitches, today we also learned about the thread we're using: DMC Floche, a five-ply thread that is wonderfully round and smooth. It's got a wonderful sheen because it's twisted with so many plies. Marion told us about her crusade to correct the misuse of the terms ply vs. strand:

• A ply is part of a thread that cannot be separated. Most threads are two plies twisted together. Floche is five plies twisted together. You wouldn't normally stitch with a single ply.
  
• A strand is a single stitchable unit of thread. Several strands may be grouped together to make the thread easier to package.

An easy way to think of it is that DMC floss is strandable cotton. When you cut a length from the skein, you're cutting a group of 6 strands. Each of those 6 strands is made up of two plies twisted together.

Maybe I'll start a stitching lexicon to keep all of the various stitching terms straight. Unfortunately , Blogger doesn't provide the ability to have specific linked pages (unlike some of the other blogging programs), so I can't start a page specifically for the lexicon. For now, I'll just create a new label of "lexicon" for this post and others with stitching definitions.