Jumping Your Embroidery Floss - The Do's & Dont's

Jumping your floss is a term used to describe when you bring your floss across the back of your fabric to work on a different section of your embroidered piece. The problem with jumping your floss is that you risk seeing the floss peeking through on the right side of the fabric.  You can see thread shadows on the front side. This is especially critical on light colored fabric that may have a bit of see-through transparency to it. Jumping floss can also result in puckering of fabric because you have the greater length of floss that is not tethered to the fabric.  Some also consider it to be a waste of floss when you jump across a design.

Overall, jumping of floss is NOT recommended in the purest of hand embroidery communities.  The “right” thing to do is to finish off your floss and start again fresh in the new section.

But I also like to go rogue and break all the rules! The back of my embroideries can best be described as HOT MESS.  To all my fellow rebels, here is my rule-breaking guidance…. If you have light colored fabric and a design that has a lot of white space around it like my Wildflower or Meadow design, do not jump your floss more than a few centimeters to get to the next flower.  BUT if you are stitching one of my bouquets from The Bloom Collection, you can jump from flower to flower so long as you do not cross into the surrounding white space and do not jump more than an inch (but pay attention to your floss tension!).  This is because AOA Bouquets are condensed stitches with virtually no white spaces peeking out with the interior of the bouquet. 

So there you have it.  Stitch wild, my friend!