Rapunzel, Rapunzel…Or, Breaking Down More Floche

Welcome to Friday, and a cold and blustery one at that – at least here in Kansas!

But in the studio, where it’s warm and cozy, there’s a bit of sunshine going on. Bright, sunshiny yellow floche, in abundance, is piling up everywhere!

Every time we start taking apart floche, it’s a lot like Rapunzel taking down her hair.

If you’re new to Needle ‘n Thread, you may not have heard me carry on about Floche.

If you’ve been here for a while, you might wish you had not heard me carry on so frequently about it. I do like the stuff.

Floche (pronounced “flowsh”) is a cotton embroidery thread that I really love, because it is such a pleasure to stitch with and I love the results when I use it.

Though Floche is probably better known for monogramming, embroidery and smocking on heirloom children’s clothes, some whitework and the like, it is a thread that works well for all kinds of surface embroidery.

If you want to go into more depth about what Floche is and how it’s different from other embroidery threads, you might check out this article, which I wrote when I first started putting these thread packs together. There’s a lot of extra information at the end of the article as well.

I use Floche frequently.

I used it on this:

…which you can read about here.

I used it on this:

…which you can read about here.

I used it on this:

…which you can read about here.

I used it on this:

…which you can read about here.

And I’ve used it on lots and lots of other projects, too.

The Thing about floche is that it comes in a Huge hank, making it somewhat expensive to collect a lot of colors. For example, it would cost a good $150 for a 20-color thread pack of full hanks. And the chance that you’d ever go through a full hank (unless you were crazy about stitching Everything under the sun with floche) is pretty slim.

So I’m putting together a thread pack for a certain project that you’ve seen before, that will be out in the first couple months of 2022. I’m not going to say which project yet – you’ll have to guess. There will be a little stitch along using the threads, too, coming out at the same time, so that will be exciting!

You’d be surprised how long it took to get all the colors of floche for the thread pack here. This project has actually been over a year in the wings. Now that we have the final colors, it’s time to break them down and twist them up into manageable skeins. Fun stuff!

On one table in the front room of my studio, there’s the floche going. On the other table, a completely different project is underway, which will become part of next year’s stitch-along series, too.

So, just in case you ever thought that needlework projects on a blog like Needle ‘n Thread just sort of haphazardly come together at the last minute (well… sometimes they do, actually!), now you know that it’s really a matter of constantly working ahead – and sometimes, even over a whole year ahead! Kinda crazy.

You can imagine how excited I was to get that last box of floche this week.

Whew.

Coming Up on Needle ‘n Thread

Next week, we’ll finish the Dragonflies once and for all, with an extra little dragonfly embroidery project.

I’m also going to share with you a beautiful new book that’s coming out very soon. You might want to put it on your Christmas wish list. I won’t be carrying this particular book, but it will be widely available through the larger book sellers out there.

And I think I’ll be able to show you some stitching experiments, too, if all goes as planned.

Have a lovely weekend!