The French knot, is a lovely stitch for adding in texture to your embroidery projects or to your textile art. It can be perfect, or messy, I love both of them. But it is much more than that. Let us have a closer look at the French Knot, Queen of the Stitches.
Look, at this lovely textile art piece above, It is a felted piece, incorporating silk and threads, and then I have embroidered it heavily with a patch of French Knots. Quite often I will add French knots in patches and small groupings. In this case I have used different thicknesses and colours of yarns and threads. It is very effective.
Here is a quick picture above to give you an idea. It is in essence this. You bring the Needle up from below, you then wind the thread around the needle 3 4 or 5 times, depending on how big you want it. Then pulling tension on the thread, you push the needle back into the fabric, very close to where you started. OK, that is the start, but look at the second row on the graphic above and you will see that you can also do a larger knot, which I call a Messy Knot. It is made the same way, but this time you do not hold the tension on the thread, so you end up with a looser more loopy knot. So the last picture in the graphic shows you that you can also move the needle further away when you put it back into the fabric, so that it leaves a little tail. I use this frequently for stems on flowers.
Above you can see where I have used it in conjunction with couching to make a really textured piece. I have made a video, which I have linked in below, which will show you my take on the French Knot and what you can do with it, It could be sprinkles on a cake, it could be froth on waves, it can be rocks on the sand. It is limited only by your imagination.
If you are interested in seeing the video, just click below. If you would like to see more of my videos. Don’t forget to like and subscribe so that you can see further videos.