Cable stitch

Continuing with my machine embroidery experiments, I tried cable stitch – that it, working upside down so that the bobbin thread is the right side.  I used a red silk hand embroidery thread in the bobbin – wound on by hand – and white top thread.  The top tension is loosened, the bobbin tension tightened.  Do this a little at a time –it is better to buy a separate bobbin holder to use for machine embroidery tension loosening, as it can be hard to return the screw to the correct position for normal sewing.  The top thread will appear to be couching the bobbin thread and as the feed dogs are down, you can make the appearance of the couching very close to spread far apart.  In the small end of my paisley, you can see how working straight stitch rows on top of each other gives a heavy texture.  I can imagine this becoming valuable when working rock strata in a landscape, or various other more conceptual types of work.  Notice also how, on the curves, there evolves some straight stitches at right angles to the line of the bobbin thread – still the top thread coming through but it stretches out as you move the stitch line on a diagonal.