Making waves

One of the things I love about embroidery is that there's no one way to do something. Want to stitch a leaf? There are dozens of ways to do it. Flowers? Let me show a million tutorials for making a rose, none of which are remotely repetitive. Every embroiderer figures out their own ways of doing things and adapts stitches to work for their style and their needs. Even when I work on a pattern or kit, my embroidery signature is on the version I create.

My tiny sheep are a perfect example of this. I'm not the first person to make sheep, or any animal, using this technique. My sheep are unique to my version of the design. Even more fun, the next time I make tiny sheep they'll be completely from the version I did in May. That's pretty cool in my book. 

As I was settling on the idea of water as a theme for this month, I wanted to see how other embroiderers create waves and bodies of water. The variations and results are amazing (do a Google image search for embroidery water or embroidery waves if you'd like to see for yourself). It's not just the stitches, but the use of color and layering create so many wonderful variations.

Today's piece is a bit of a practice for the month. I wanted to try different stitches to see which ones I like best for waves. I'm partial to split stitch, single back stitch, and stem stitch. The others work too, but I like those best. So many ways to make waves (interpret that as you will). 

Fun fact: If you cut your finger (not embroidery related), and then you accidentally slip and stick a needle in said cut, it hurts worse than getting lemon juice in a cut. 

From the back (work in progress): I used a single back stitch for the last two rows in this picture. I really like the pattern it made, so I may reverse the stitch for a piece this month.

Details:
Stitches: split, stem, whipped back stitch, single back stitch, chain, double back stitch (I don't really know if that's the correct term, but I did two rows of back stitches, so it's a double in my book.)
Thread palette: DMC 322, 3845, 797, 995, 820, 3842 (6 strands) I don't use 6 strands often, but wanted to really see the stitches so I used the full strand. Less strands would make a difference with a few of these, particularly the split and stem stitches. It might also be fun to combine 3 and 6 strands for a piece.