Glimpse – PART TWO

Okay, you’ve prepared the mesh in Part One, so let’s get going with the filling stitches.

Here’s the chart. You can see we have two types of filling, open squares with overcast edges and squares filled with two crossed bars. We’re starting with the filled squares. (I call them “window stitches”, because they look like a child’s drawing of a window.) Use the same colour that you used for the edging stitches. Thread the needle with as long a length of thread as you can manage comfortably, to avoid having to make too many joins.

There are four journeys to make. The first journey is a simple zig-zag.
Start by darning the thread into the back of the edging stitches close to the right-hand end, and carry the thread up to the starting point shown on this diagram.

It’s much easier to do than to describe! You make a wrap around the nearest side of the square, then a long stitch across and around the opposite side. Cross this stitch on the way back, take the thread under the nearest side, and finally go over the nearest side again. Bring the thread through where shown to start the second side of the filled square.

Here’s a photo of the long stitch being worked:

Then do exactly the same for the second side. Wrap, long-stitch, wrap. The second  long bar will lie on top of the first one. After making the second short stitch on this side, your thread should come out ready to make the first side of the next square — we’ll be finishing the other two sides of these squares on the second journey, so don’t worry about them right now. Carry on working the first and second sides until you have five squares.

Now you need to go down the third side of the fifth square – that’s easy. Just work one wrap on each side of the long bar that is already in place. Following the journey plan, do the first side of the next square as normal. (If you want all your windows to look exactly the same, then you need the first bar of this window to lie on top of the second bar. So when you do the long stitch on the second side, slip the needle under the first bar while making the second, so the first bar lies on top of it. You’ll need to check if the second bar needs to be under or on top, whenever you are doing the second side of a window. If you don’t want worry about which bars are on top, and just do them as they come, that’s fine, too.)

Carry on working first and second sides until you get to the ninth square – that one only has its first side worked on this trip, and then you start zig-zagging back upwards, as you did at the beginning. You should have the idea by now!

Somewhere around here, you’ll need a new thread. To do it neatly, work the last few stitches with the old thread catching the tail of the new thread under them. Then transfer the needle to the new thread and carry on, catching the old thread under the stitches until it is secure. Cut off the two short ends, and carry on with the new thread until you need to join the thread again.

Don’t end off the thread when you reach the end of the first journey, carry on to work the second journey, which will take you back to where you started. It’s not such a straightforward path as the first journey (which is why I didn’t start with it) but if you follow the plan, you can see that all the sides of all the part-finished windows are visited, and you also make three new windows in each section.

I haven’t shown the whole grid, as it repeats. When you get to the end, you’ll be back where you started. Carry the thread down a bar into the back of the edge, and darn it in.

Okay, turn your work 180 degrees, and work the third and fourth journeys exactly the same way.

You should now have this:

That’s quite enough for one post, so I’ll show you the overcasting and the finishing in Part Three.

Any problems, questions? Please let me know in the comments and I’ll try to make things clearer!

 

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