Come on, you knew today had to be Christmas, since we've celebrated almost every other fall holiday the past couple weeks. 

Today's small stitch is a really cute darning stitch, a technique I love. Unlike most of my go-to darning stitches, this one is on the diagonal.  And it's great.  I need to do this more.

As a reminder, darning stitches are similar to running stitches, where you begin at one edge and weave your way up and down across to the opposite edge, whether that is on the horizontal, vertical or, like today, diagonal axis.  Unlike traditional stitches with a crisp, wrapped edge, darning stitches are much smoother across their respective path.

Darning stitches are great for areas that you want to soften a bit, or want to have some of the beautiful painting show through.  I (over)use darning stitches for floors and walls, skies, sand, or tree trunks, to name just a few. Today's stitch is illustrated as a background for Mile High Santa. 

This stitch diagram, along with all other #whimsicalwednesday and #smallspacesunday stitch diagrams, can also be found on a Pinterest board here.

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If you like what you see on this blog, want to learn some very creative decorative stitches, and how to put them all together, whimsicalstitch.com sells stitch guides and stitch concepts for Melissa Shirley Designs, Zecca Designs, and Patience Brewster.  60 guides are currently available, with 12 new Stitch Concepts just added! Click here to see the newest guides and click here to see the entire collection.

I hope you have the perfect spot for this stitch!  Please enjoy!