chicken scratch

Bring your needle out from the backside of the fabric at the end of the running stitch. Slip needle under running stitches in a counter clockwise direction. This is done all on top of the fabric and under the running stitch! Make one or two circles with your thread depending on how thick you want your circle to be. To finish your circle, insert the needle back into the same hole that you came out of to begin the circle. The symbol “o” is used to indicate the woven circle stitch.

Variation 1

Here are a couple of alternative woven circle stitches.

The first one is done by wrapping around four adjoining corner posts of the Smyrna crosses to create a square.

Variation 2

Create flower petals by going around the corner posts of two diagonal Smyrna crosses.

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You run your needle in and out of the fabric using the edges of the squares as your guide. The common chart symbols are “|” for running top to bottom and “-” running left to right.

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You’ll be using the fabric blocks like counted cross stitch using the corners and sides of the block being the “holes” in the Aida or linen fabric. Using one of the gingham squares do a regular cross stitch, work another cross stitch going from middle of the sides and top to bottom. The key is to always do the stitches in the same order. The commonly used symbols on charts are “X” which sometimes indicates using a darker thread or “*” to use a lighter thread.

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