There are two paths to apply thread to work. The most used on a sewing machine is top thread – it follows the usual thread path from the spool to the needle, and through the magic of the lock stitch is looped around the bobbin thread and drawn back to the top of the work.

This little video shows clearly all the moving parts that make up a stitch. You can see that the top thread travels through several steps to get to the fabric. It also gets pulled back and forth through the eye of the needle as the take-up releases it for each stitch and takes it up again. This wear can be absorbed by finer threads running through appropriate sized eyes, and a wide range of threads can be used.

In a perfectly counter-intuitive move matched only by the wire industry, thread weights are inverse to the actual size of the thing in question. The 50wt thread on the left, from Superior, is the finest I tend to use because anything smaller than that does not cover the underlying fabric in any useful fashion. The weights increase to 40wt, also from Superior, 30wt, from Sulky, and 12wt from Sulky. All these are 100% cotton threads, and three of the four are also variegated threads.

Once threads are too coarse to fit through the eye of a needle, they can be wound on a bobbin and worked from the back of the piece. I’ll take some pictures of that process and demonstrate in the next bench notes.

I wrote before about threads. This is a small sampler of four variegated threads I use routinely; three cotton, one rayon.

If you look at the samplers, you can see the Valdani and both Sulky threads have a long color change – there is a fair amount of each color on the thread. In close stitching, such as cobbling (small round circles) or small overlapping scribbles this long change gives depth and interest to the area covered. In lines, such as outlining or contouring or sketching, it means that the lines change color or character unless they are repeated, going back and forth over the line brings more different colors to it as well as making it a thicker line.

The King Tut, from Superior Thread, has a short color change, roughly every inch. This makes the thread read more like one color than several, as your eye averages the color within the area. I use these threads to blend different fabrics into a more cohesive mass. Because they are finer than the other threads, I also use them in the mid-ground and background of a piece.

I think the prettiest threads I use are the Sulky Blendable cottons – there are more different colors in one spool, and the patterns are more variable. I use these threads in the foreground of a piece, to keep details in the foreground from becoming an undifferentiated mass.

For a long time, I only knew of and used Sulky Rayon threads. They are easy to find, and come in many solid shades as well as the variegated versions. Rayon has a truly delightful sheen which is especially good for adding details and highlights to a subject, but it can get overwhelming in large areas.

Finding more variegated cotton threads, and variegations in different lengths, has helped my work evolve in a more painterly direction.