Buttonhole Shading Stitch

Buttonhole Shading Stitch is also known as

Blanket Stitch Shading _[EN], Remplissage au point de feston _[FR], Verzahnter Schlingstich / Verzahnter Knopflchstich _[DE],  Punto asola _[IT], Ponto casear _[PT].

The Buttonhole Shading Stitch allows rows of Blanket Stitch or Buttonhole Stitch to be worked closely together in successive rows of different shades of a colour to build up a gradient effect. It can make wonderful fillings and comes with great scope for experimenting. This can be a good substitute for the Encroaching Satin Stitch. Let us work over a leaf pattern. For the sake of the tutorial, I will not work on the Buttonhole Stitches closely, but a little apart using only two shades of colour to illustrate. Buttonhole Shading can be rigid and will not take curves smoothly. So, add outlines to the patterns to define the shape better.

Fig 1: Draw a leaf pattern and divide it into different sections as shown. Now, make a row of Blanket Stitch from inside out, on the first section. Adjust the length of the stitches to cover the space of the pattern.	Fig 2: Next, come out with a different shade of the same colour and start filling in the next section, as shown. Make sure that the stitches fall in between and over the previous stitches. It looks like the successive row is encroaching into the previous row.
Fig 3: Continue with this procedure, taking a successive shade of the same color to fill in each section. Once finished, the filling would look like this.