embroidered towel

Changing pace a bit from sewing to embroidery, this is a towel that I finished last month to give to my mother for Christmas. I found the towel at Joanns - it's the size of a kitchen or hand towel, terry cloth except for a panel of embroidery fabric at one end. The fabric is tricky. Traditional aida is more stiff than the towel, and the fibers tend to hold their place unless the thread is pulled too tight. The towel had a much looser weave, and I had to be extra careful not to pull any of the stitches because any stress on the fabric greatly enlarged the size of the holes.



The pattern is an example of Assisi embroidery. I learned about Assisi work from a book that I found at the library sale last year. According to the book, the designs were originally based on the stonework around Assisi. The blue stitching is Holbein rather than the more common backstitch, which means that the outlines are stitched in two sets of running stitch (leaving every other stitch empty the first time around, then filling them in on a second pass). This allowed the detail to appear quickly, and halved the time spent studying the chart. The yellow stitching is cross stich, and took significantly more time than I was expecting for a piece of this size, because all of the background was filled in.