Tvistsöm

Day 48: What accounts for the popularity of some forms of needlework over others? While tvistsöm is really just a long-armed version of cross-stitch and almost as easy to work, it has never achieved the same distinction as its cousin. It gives a more highly textured appearance owing to the fact that it is always worked in one direction (left to right or right to left depending on your handedness), with the work being turned at the end of each row. Individual rows look braided; side-by-side, they resemble cables. It is a very dense stitch when worked with the correct weight thread, allowing "tails" to be concealed on the front of the work. The back, therefore, is much tidier than that resulting from cross-stitch, and what's not to like about that? Here, I am working tvistsöm on a handwoven table runner with clustered warps. The fabric is not the even-weave on which one would normally work tvistsöm, and I found that I got the best results when working the rows on the length of the cloth rather than its width. It is necessary to treat each three-thread warp cluster (where the yellow floats appear) as a "pair" of threads in order to keep the stitches equal to those in the tabby sections. Where single stitches occur in a tvistsöm pattern, they are worked as cross-stitches.