Satin stitch

What it is

Satin stitch fills a shape with straight stitches laid side by side, each one crossing the whole shape, so the surface reads as a single sheet of thread. It is the most satisfying fill there is and the least forgiving: the sheen comes from every stitch lying at the same angle, and the crisp edge comes from what you do before the fill.

How to work it

1. Outline the shape first with a row of small stitches just INSIDE the drawn edge. This underlay is what gives satin a sharp border and a slight lift.
2. Come up on one edge of the shape and go straight down on the opposite edge.
3. Come back up right beside where the last stitch started, so the stitches touch without overlapping.
4. Work across the shape keeping the angle constant. Turning the angle part-way breaks the sheen into two patches.
5. Keep the tension even and light. Pulling satin stitches puckers the fabric, and the pucker does not come out.
6. Finish by checking the edge from a low angle — anywhere the underlay shows is where a stitch landed short.

What it is good for

• Small solid shapes: petals, leaves, berries, dots.
• Letters, where the flat sheen is most of the effect.
• Anything under roughly 9 mm across in the direction the stitches run.

What goes wrong

• Spans longer than about 9 mm. They sag, they snag on everything, and they never lie flat again once caught — split them instead.
• Changing the stitch angle inside one shape.
• A region narrower than the thread itself. There is nowhere to put a row, and the studio warns rather than filling it with nonsense.
• Stitching the edge run ON the drawn line rather than inside it — half its width then lies outside the shape and shows as a piped flank.

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

71counted from the drawing above, not estimated

Floss it would take

81 cmworking thread to cut, at 2 strands

Rows are spaced 0.72 of a thread width apart so they nestle, and each span overshoots the contour by 0.18 mm because a real needle lands just past the line. The edge run goes down first, inset by half its own width. One angle is chosen per shape — the Auto button measures the least-bad single angle, which is why a letter like W is genuinely hard.

Watch it worked

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