Onto the finishing touches! 

Your foliage can balance a design, hide mistakes, add an extra dimension - and with a keen use of color, even help your main flowers to really pop. 

 This time we’re taking that detached chain stitch method and going one step further, to the fly stitch.

Below at the top center, is a single fly stitch - to the left, right, and below, you can see it stacked, scattered, close together, or far apart for an incredible variety of results.

 Check out the video below to see how it works!

https://www.mixedcolor.net/fly-stitch

The obvious use are these sweet little fern shapes (below), which can be done at a variety of widths, heights, lengths. These often add some much needed textural differences, and can even be stitched on top of other stitches.

This is aesthetically very similar to the fern stitch, except the fern stitch is made with three separate stitches and that, to me, is quite boring compared to the magic of the fly stitch.

Below is an example of a recent embroidery of mine - the entire thing was made using satin stitch, and while that was intentional, I looked at the finished results and thought… too flat. Too smooth. Too uniform. 

It’s never good enough, huh??

 Just kidding, instead of taking it as a “i didn’t do this right” I took this as an invitation for inviting some new ideas. 

 First off, the obvious choice, sequins and beads (still joking) - I can’t help but add sparkle when something doesn’t feel right - but that still wasn’t enough.

So I added some fly stitches to the spines of the leaves, in three strands of sparkling navy threads. It was a hit! Or at the very least, I loved it!

(Note: One thing to always keep in mind when stitching over satin stitch however, is that your stitches can easily get lost between the long stitches; so making sure the stitch that is going on top doesn’t line up directly with the direction of the satin stitch, see the illustration below.)

The below embroidery has the fly stitch in two different styles (detailed in zoom in at the right).  

The white ferns are created using the classic fly stitch, while the striped leaves use the fly stitch huddled close together, alternating two sitches of each color.

This striped leaf is created by stitching the fly stitches as close together as possible.

You can see in the closeup at the below right - the first stage is to stitch two stitches each of one color, leaving a gap ever so slightly smaller than the thickness of these initial two stitches. 

By leaving the gap smaller, this helps the stitches to sit close enough together for full coverage over the fabric.

And below, a very simple use of the fly stitch as ground cover foliage. 

The upper row of olive leaves was created using two strands of embroidery floss, and by making a single vertical straight stitch at the top, followed by two fly stitches

The lower rows of olive are a single strand of embroidery floss; one vertical straight stitch followed by one fly stitch.

I hope you feel more inspired to spark your own creativity, I’ll leave you with this line from my book, Mystical Stitches:

"The creative process is not simply about what is being made; it’s an entirely mystical process that teaches us how to move between the internal world of the soul and the physical world outside. 

All that is illuminated at the crossing of this bridge happens first in making a piece of art and, eventually, through the shaping of existence itself. By allowing ourselves to engage with our own creative process, we become more and more familiar with the process of bringing our dreams into reality"