Long & short stitch
Confident stitcherFill stitches
Rows of alternating long and short stitches that blend into each other — how large shapes get filled (real stitches max out around 9 mm) and how colours are shaded.
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What it is
Long & short stitch is how embroidered petals and feathers end up looking painted. It is satin stitch broken into rows of alternating long and short stitches, staggered so each row interlocks with the one above instead of meeting it in a line — which lets a shape be bigger than one stitch can cross, and lets one colour blend into the next.
How to work it
- Work the first row along the edge, alternating a long stitch and a short one. That ragged lower edge is why the first row is different from every row after it.
- Start the second row in the next colour by bringing the needle UP through the end of a stitch in the row above, splitting its thread.
- Keep every stitch pointing the same way — towards the tip of the petal, not straight across it. Fan the angle gradually round a curve.
- Stagger the ends deliberately. A straight join between two rows is a visible seam, and it is the thing that makes shading look like stripes.
- On the last row, fill the shorts back in so the far edge comes out level.
What it is good for
- Shapes too big for satin stitch to cross in one stitch.
- Petals, leaves, wings and anything that should change colour across itself.
- Realistic shading generally — it is the single biggest step up in realism available by hand.
What goes wrong
- Rows of equal length. They stripe, and the stripes are all anyone sees.
- A hard boundary between colours. Adjacent colours have to interleave, not meet.
- Stitches that stay parallel round a curve instead of fanning towards the tip.
By the numbers
- Longest stitch allowed
- 9 mmanything wider is split long-and-short
- Thread width
- 0.5 mm – 1.4 mmone strand to six
- Stitches in this example
- 163counted from the drawing above, not estimated
- Floss it would take
- 1.7 mworking thread to cut, at 2 strands
Two different things share this name, and the studio does one of them. Any satin span longer than the 9 mm cap is automatically split long-and-short, with a 0.5 mm overlap and the cut positions drifting row by row so the junctions never line up — that is what the preview here shows, and it is real. Colour SHADING is not a fill mode yet: the studio gives you the shape and the stitch direction, and the blend between threads is worked by hand over it.
Watch it worked
Hand-picked from YouTube. Nothing loads from YouTube until you press play.