This article is part of a series on Advanced and Specialty Stitches. Check the main article for a full list of stitches. This one is just about the jessica stitch.
Table of Contents
What is a Jessica Stitch?
This is a stitch you probably won’t encounter super often. I’ve only ever seen them used in Chatelaine designs. For example, the florals in The Japanese Garden Mandala. There may be other designers that use it, but I’m not too familiar with them. They are however, an absolutely gorgeous stitch and I wanted to share it with you all. If you know of any other designers that use them, please let me know! I would love to have an excuse to stitch these more often!
They’ve also filled in the middle here with a different color. Plus you’ll see some algerian eyelets and lazy daisies in here too. Honestly, if you ever want to practice specialty stitches — just pick up a Chatelaine design.
What does it look like in patterns?
These stitches tend to look roughly like something drawn in a spirograph, but the main features are its overlapping lines and geometric nature. It can have different numbers of points and can be different sizes. My example here only has 3 points on each side vs the ones pictured above having four.
How to stitch a Jessica Stitch
It’s hard to truly describe how to stitch one of these though, so you’ll want to refer to the diagram and follow the stitches around. Although it looks round in the center, all the stitches are straight lines. They’re layered over each other in such a way to create that round effect.
Get an idea of how big you want this stitch to be, imagining a square around it. Starting two up from the lower left corner, stitch across to the middle of the top of the square. Create a second line, starting just above the starting point of the previous line, and ending to the right of its end point.
Do the same on the next stitch, but end it a stitch down and to the right. Continue around the shape following the points on the graph.
Other Shapes/Sizes
Jessica stitches don’t have to be round, though! You can make them into spirals, chevrons, etc. All sorts of different shapes! I’d recommend checking out the My Tree of Dreams tutorials for some fun ideas on how to use this style of stitch.
It would be interesting to see what other shapes you can come up with using this same technique!
