Lazy daisy

What it is

A lazy daisy is one chain stitch worked on its own and tacked down at the tip — which is why its other name, detached chain, describes it better. One of them is a petal or a leaf. A ring of them is a flower, and it is the fastest convincing flower in hand embroidery.

How to work it

1. Come up at the base of the petal, at the flower centre.
2. Go back down in the same hole, leaving a loop of thread on the surface.
3. Come up at the tip of the petal, with the needle inside the loop.
4. Pull until the loop is the petal shape you want, and stop before it flattens.
5. Go down again just over the end of the loop, making a tiny straight stitch. That tack is the whole thing that holds the petal.
6. For a flower, work the petals like a clock face: 12, 6, 3 and 9 first, then halve each gap. Even spacing matters more than the petal count.

What it is good for

• Daisy and blossom petals.
• Small leaves along a stem — far more convincing than a filled shape at that size.
• Insect wings. A filled wing turns a bee into a beetle; an open loop reads as a wing.
• Anywhere you want an outlined shape rather than a solid one.

What goes wrong

• Pulling the loop tight — it becomes a straight stitch and the petal disappears.
• A tack stitch that is too long. Past a millimetre or two it reads as a stem growing out of the petal tip.
• Petals of noticeably different lengths in one flower, which is more obvious than uneven spacing.

By the numbers

Petals

6

Petal length

8 mm

Stitches in this example

12counted from the drawing above, not estimated

Floss it would take

29 cmworking thread to cut, at 2 strands

The library’s Lazy Daisy (flower) is six petals at an 8 mm radius, and Lazy Daisy (leaf) is the same construction worked once. The pattern charges a detached chain 2.0 for its back-of-work factor, because the thread travels base-to-tip and tip-to-base underneath.

Watch it worked

Hand-picked from YouTube. Nothing loads from YouTube until you press play.