Stitch Fun – Fishbone Stitch

Stitch this Fabulous Sampler

If you have purchased the Pre Printed Fabric Panel or have tranferred the Template to your fabric – scroll down to the ‘Start Stitching’ section to get started straight away.

Fishbone Stitch

This is a stitch I use a lot in my designs as I love the way it fills a leaf shape so beautifully and with relative ease. It’s definately one you will be glad you learned if you have not done so already.

Where to stitch on your sampler…

Draw a leaf shape in the right lower quarter of your circle like so…

Here’s the size of mine to give you an idea of how much room to take up – as you can see I didn’t go down any further than 2.5cm from the burden stitch.

I used a full 6 strands of thread so that you can see clearly how the stitch is worked…

Come up at 1 and take the needle back in at 2 so you create a small vertical stitch (approx. 5mm) at the tip of the leaf shape…

When you take the thread in at 4 this creates a slight diagonal stitch.

Continue to fill the shape by bringing the thread up on the outer edge of the shape and back in on the opposite side of the centre line – alternating each side of the shape as you go.

When you take the thread back in on the opposite side of the centre line you will notice that there is a very slight crossover of the thread from the previous stitch.

Keep going – when you reach the tip of the shape at the other end you will see there are still some bits that need filling on the sides. Fill these in with straight stitches to complete the shape.

Once you get the hang of it you can use it to fill tiny leaves right through to much larger ones.

Here’a a heart shape I did a while ago which was done with fishbone stitch and then outlined in stem stitch…

As always – hop over to the Happy Stitching Facebook Group and share your progress as well as for help and advice should you get stuck along the way!

Want to remember this? Post this tutorial to your favourite Pinterest board!