Fun with Floche

As a thank you for helping with the Alpine Rose project, my student sent me a set of three flour sack towels with pre-transferred designs by Mary Corbet of Needle 'n Thread. The towels seemed like a good excuse, um, opportunity to play with some fairly new-to-me threads. So, I went shopping.

Mary Corbet is definitely a big fan of DMC's floche and floche would certainly work well on the towels. I tried floche once many years ago and have always wanted to play with it some more. I also thought that mixing floche and Chameleon variegated perlé threads could be interesting.

I bought a few colours of each type of thread:

I was pleased to discover that Needle in a Haystack sells 1/4 skeins of floche so I could buy lots of colours, but keep the cost down. The Chameleons came from Lorna Bateman.

I bought size 12 Chameleon perlés as they are about the same size as the floche. They're both about the thickness of two strands of DMC cotton floss. The perlés have a much tighter twist than the floche which is softly twisted.

I decided on a palette of blues and purples (and greens, of course, since these are flowers). The finished towel will be used in a room where there are blues, and touches of purple, and yellow. It will be used to cover a desktop calculator/adding machine which needs protection because it sits next to an open (and breezy) window for most of the year and gets very dirty!

I want to play with colour and some texture. I'm going to try to resist the urge to shade too much. That shouldn't be too difficult because you can't shade with the perlé threads--they're too tightly twisted--and the floche doesn't have enough colours available to do anything other than simple shading.

I started with a purple flower and shaded the petals:

I couldn't decided which colour to use for the tie downs on the lattice so put that off until later. I also wasn't thrilled with the colours of the French knots. I really wanted them to be more gold rather than orange. The goldish floche was fine, but I wanted to also use a variegated perlé to provide some visual interest. I didn't have a lot of choices and ended up with an semi-gold orange variegation that starts to become orangey-red as it darkens. This wasn't what I had in mind, but I decided to live with it for the moment. Removing French knots isn't fun and I didn't have any better alternatives except for a solid colour floche (and that would be boring).

The design has three different flower motifs. Because I wanted to play with texture, I decided to do something different with each set of leaves and stems.

For the purple flower the stem is chain stitched in floche and whipped with perlé:

On the next flower design I got to use my favourite thread in the entire project: a blue variegated perlé. It's a unique colour and is not available for purchase. I bought it when Lorna was in town last year. The centre is shaded with floche yellows. The ring around the centre was stem stitched with purple floche and then overlaid with a button hole in a green Chameleon.

The stem for the blue flower was done in Palestrina stitch. It's a little too bumpy for me, but it does provide texture. The filled side of the leaves were embroidered like a whipped spider wheel. I laid straight stitches for the veins and then whipped them. When complete, this towel will not be under tension so I couldn't have threads that are too long. I think these are short enough.

The leaf on the purple flower was filled with laid work and couched down veins. I don't know if this will keep the laid work in place over time. If I can keep the cats away from the towel it might have a chance!

I stitched a second purple flower and made a couple of changes. I used the darkest yellow floche along with the orange Chameleon on the French knots. It's better, but still not what I envisioned. I also tightened up the lattice spacing and decided to use blue for the tie downs.

The orange was still bugging me, so I did some pondering. I settled on 'if you can't beat them, join them'. I had one more flower design to stitch, so used more orange!

I had assistance whilst pondering:

The orange flower seemed to help and I can live with it. The variegation in the perlé is very pretty on the satin stitched orange petals.

The stem and leaf for the orange flower got a little crazy. I doubled whipped the stem so that the whipping crisscrosses and then used bullions for the veins on the leaf. Although I didn't want to I had to couch the bullions down because there is no way they will survive in their natural state. Unfortunately, my couching stitches on a couple of the bullions went a little wonky, but that's the way it goes sometimes. I did a better couching job on the second set of bullions (below):

The three flower designs were figured out at this point. All I had to do was finish them off.

This was fun and it's very cheerful! I don't usually work on cotton fabric, but these flour sack towels are very nice. They have a tight weave and are a good weight. The fabric feels nice as well. The floche and perlé were great. They're wonderful to stitch with and they worked well together on this project. I think I'll use them again on the other towels. Hopefully, I have enough threads!

References

• Needle 'n Thread Shop (Spring Variety Towel Set)
• Lorna Bateman Embroidery (Chameleon threads)
• Needle in a Haystack (Floche 1/4 skeins)