A Suggestion for Stitching Hair

Stitching figures is not my favorite, largely because I don’t like stitching hair. While there are many great ideas and stitches you can use, here are a couple of techniques you can use without lots of fancy stitching. It is a multi-step technique and uses different shades of thread to create the light and dimension real hair has.

If you want straight hair, stop after the overstitching. Curly hair does all the steps.

First, stitch the hair in Tent Stitch. If there are different colors painted on ther canvas, stitch them. The result will be blocky, but that’s OK.

To create movement in the hair, overstitch. Overstitching is a simple way to add dimension, without more complex techniques like padding or whipping stitches.Use longer straight stitches for this. If the hair will be curly very few of these stitches should be used and those mainly in the straighter part of the hair.

You will use all the colors you used in the first step, in about the same proportions. Throughout the hair, especially where the colors change, add French Knots. They should use different numbers of strands, different numbers of wraps and even different sizes of needles which will create more texture.

Stitch one color at a time.

This softens the edges of the color changes, and adds texture.

How do you know when you have enough knots? How curly is the hair supposed to be? The curlier the hair, the more knots. But never do solid French Knots unless you are stitching a poodle, people don’t have hair that curly.

As a last step, if you want even more texture, brush the hair with as wire brush.