Pendant Couching Stitch

As the title of this post suggests, this beautiful stitch is the Pendant Couching Stitch.  It is the latest stitch I have learned from my 100 Stitches Plus list. 

I found this stitch in the book The Encyclopedia of Embroidery Techniques by Pauline Brown.  

This stitch is made up of a length of floss that is couched {held in place} by small straight stitches. I decided to use two colors of floss as it makes it easier to see the techniques.  

After looking at the diagram of the stitch, I thought it might be a good idea for me to draw some guidelines. I wanted to be able to have a straight stitching line to follow but also to have a guideline to ensure that the pendants would all be the same size. 

With my water-soluble marker, I drew two parallel lines - 1/2" apart:

For the length of floss that is going to be couched, I used this pink perle cotton.  This is a color variations floss -  DMC 4180.  

I made sure to use a long length of floss, this is going to form all of the pendants so it needs to be much longer that just the stitching line.

The first step is to come up through the fabric on the top stitching line.  It wouldn't matter which way you worked this stitch, I did mine from left to right so I started at the left end of the line:

Pull the floss all the way through.  You can see here how long my length of floss is:

For the couching floss, I again used perle cotton. This black is DMC 310.

Loosely lay the floss to be couched along the stitching line.

Bring the couching floss up through the fabric a little below and a little to the right of where the length of floss to be couched first emerged:

Pull all the way through:

Take a small stitch by going back into the fabric right above where your floss just emerged.  Take the stitch right over the floss that is being couched:

Pull all the way through making a small stitch.  This is the Couching Stitch.  The length of floss is now held to the fabric:

Just continue making these Couching Stitches - the directions suggested spacing them fairly close together, I ended up making mine about 1/4" apart.

Continue in the same way until you reach the end of the stitching guideline:

Next I started to form the pendants.  You can see I still had a lot of floss to work with: 

Using my needle, I carefully started drawing the excess floss back through the Couching Stitches:

I started forming the pendants by pulling enough floss between two Couching Stitches to make a loop. 

When I had all the pendants formed, I took the excess floss back into the fabric and secured it. 

You can see several of the pendants are still a bit uneven and not reaching all the way to the lower guideline:

I solved this problem by pinning a few in place and carefully adjusting the rest until they were all even!

Here is a look at the underside - you can see where I secured the floss:

I rinsed out the guidelines:

and took it out of the hoop.  

I think this is a beautiful stitch and so easy!