Remember that thing I said about being distracted easily? It’s so true. Case in point:
That there is tambour embroidery, which I spent a little over an hour working on last night at Project Night. A while back, I’d made a valiant but frustrating effort to do chain stitch embroidery using a regular needle. It worked, but was immensely time-consuming. In the end, I plan on embroidering enough fabric to make a ghagra out of, and so the time I was looking at in my future for the embroidery seemed to stretch into the future of the Earth, when the sun becomes a red giant and we’re all gone and the planet is a cinder. I was not enthusiastic.
However, Lea, who is fairly awesome, had a tambour needle in her cache of supplies, and so I was handed a frame, the needle, and some thread to play with. It’s really fiddly. There’s a trick to it, and to not getting your needle caught in the fabric (which happened to me a lot). Apparently you get fast when you get the hang of it, and I sort of got there, where I was doing six stitches every five seconds or so. I think that if I practice some more, I can get to be fairly speedy.
These are my favorite parts of the freeform thing I was making:
You can see where I’ve caught the thread on itself and where the stitches are kind of loose. Hopefully I’ll do that less and less as I get better. Next I’m going to try a smaller needle and the gold thread (which I plan on using for the zari work of the ghagra) and see how that goes. I’m very stubborn. I will be like this guy someday soon:
Actually, if I can be even half that fast, I’ll be happy.
(I think, in review of this video, my fabric needs to be MUCH tighter than I’ve got it. The tension seems to help the smooth progress of the needle through the fabric.)
In other words, no knitting happened, yet again. But this is like crochet, which is like knitting! So I’m not that far off.
knitters = angry mob 
Janice, I was looking at punch needle supplies in a craft store last week. The punch needle has thread carried on top of the fabric and the loop is pushed to the back of the fabric but it isn’t being secured. They look the same/similiar, but the structure is different. Tambour work is sturdy enough for washable clothing, I only ever see punch needle embroidery in frames. I don’t think it would hold up to abrasion and use very well at all.
Is that the same as punch needle embroidery?
I am not certain. It appears to be very similar, but not the same. The tambour embroidery is a speed solution to conventional chain-stitch embroidery (which takes eleventy billion times longer than tambour). It’s possible that punch needle grew out of tambour, though.
I am insanely jealous at how much faster this would be than European embroidery. Which reminds me, there’s probably design I could be doing.
Yup yup. That part actually makes me feel better, because I think following lines might stress me out a lot less than making it up as I go along.
Look! Shiny…
Look how he’s rotating the needle with his thumb. I think that’s what’s pulling the needle at the right angle. I can’t wait to try this again, borrowing your learning curve!
I think I was sort of getting that when I was doing it. I seriously think, though, that fabric tension is a HUGE factor. I have some thumbtacks at home; I’m going to try later to see if that helps.