Review – Metallic Thread

One of my friends messaged me on Facebook with a stitchery emergency last night looking for some silver thread – I told her several options were out there in the floss-o-sphere, but that one of my very favorites is Kreinik’s Japan Thread.

In case you are not familiar with this product, Kreinik Japan Threads are synthetic, so they won’t tarnish. It looks like you are stitching with real metal. You can either use them for stitching like any other floss or you can couch them down using other flosses or filaments. Use silver or gold Japan Thread for embellishing wedding seed bags, blinging up ornaments, adding shimmer to needlepoint projects, or to shine up cross stitch samplers – or whatever else you can think of using them for. And for all of my friends who were waiting for a Firefly reference, Kreinik Japan Threads are SHINY!

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How to Railroad Your Cross Stitch

I love the look of variegated cross stitch floss and how it makes it possible to stitch with a variety of colors without changing thread, giving your project more depth and a more complex look without you having to do anything different.

Or at least not much different. I recently came across this blog post from The Copper Fox all about how to use variegated floss and it noted that many people would say it’s a good idea to complete a whole stitch (when you’re stitching whole cross stitches) with the floss before going on to the next stitch. Most of us stitch row by row, but of course if you do that with variegated yarn, it could change color along the way and you’ll end up with stitches that are half one color and half another color or a different shade.

Of course that makes total sense but I’d never thought about it.

The post includes swatches with different kinds of variegated threads to show the different between working stitch by stitch or row by row, and it doesn’t make a huge different over the small area shown but I can see how it might make a difference if you had really long rows or if you just want to make sure your stitches are a single color whenever possible.

In addition to this experiment, the post talks about other ways to work with multicolored floss, including deliberately mixing the colors among the strands of floss you are stitching with and stitching in a different order instead of right to left and top to bottom (or whatever direction you typically work) to get different effects from the thread.

It’s fun to geek out on this stuff because it can make a difference if you want to play with it, or you can just stitch on without giving it much thought, and both will give you good results.

Check out all the experiments at The Copper Fox.

Do you do anything different when you stitch with variegated floss? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo: The Copper Fox]

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