Lines in your Basketweave?

Today’s guest post is from Needlepoint for Fun‘s Brenda Stimpson, who tells us why you Basketweave might not look as good as it should and what you can do about it.

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Needlepoint for Fun regularly gets comments from stitchers saying they are seeing diagonal “lines” forming on the front of their basketweave stitching. If you are not sure whether this is a disease affecting your stitching then it may help the diagnosis to know that it looks like the picture above.

Can you see the faint ridges of diagonal lines that have formed on the front of the stitched canvas? It is like you can see the path the stitcher has taken.

Its official title is basketweave shadow-itis and, thankfully, the cause is known and the cure is easy.

Shadow-itis occurs when your needle enters the canvas holes at different angles and/or bends the underlying canvas in an inconsistent way. For example, I created the ridges in the example above by stitching each down row of basketweave using the continous motion stitching technique (sewing method), and stitching each up row using the stab method. If you look closely at the stitches you can see they are angled slightly differently as a result and this is creating the shadow.

The sewing method means a frame cannot be used (frames help keep stitches even) and it has the needle snaking over the underlying canvas thread, making it buckle a little. The stab method (where the needle is pushed in from the front with one hand and pulled through to the back with the other, or with the same hand brought around) is a better way of getting even stitches. The stab method takes longer to execute (no pun intended) than the sewing method, but the needle is pushed into the canvas at the same angle and the underlying canvas threads are not lifted like they are with the sewing method.

Here is a similar swatch of basketweave, stitched using the same fiber, but with the shadow-itis cured. I stitched this using only a stab method, so the needle is entering the canvas at the same angle, and pulling similarly on the thread for each stitch.

You can also create a shadowy line on your canvas if you break the basketweave pattern by laying two down rows, or two up rows, alongside each other. This is why, when I finish a thread at the end of a row and I then put my needlepoint aside to go and do something else, I place my needle in the canvas in the direction my next row needs to go. e.g. I place it with the point facing down if my next basketweave row is a down row, and with the point pointing to the top of the canvas if my next baskletweave row needs to be an up row.

Happy basketweaving everyone!