Stitch Flowers: Turkey Rug Knot

Stitch flowers using the Turkey Rug Knot.

During visits to my native place, one ‘weed’ that you will never miss during those walks were the thorny ‘Touch-me-not’ (mimosa pudica). I remember teasing these plants by touching them and seeing them ‘sleep’ instantly. It was mesmerizing! Now, this wild plant is dwindling. These Touch-me-not had fuzzy pink round flowers that inspired this pattern. I used 3 strands of thread and kept the stitches sparse and not too dense to keep up with the feel of the actual flowers.

Fig 1: Get your fabric, hoop, and threads ready. To stitch the flowers, mark the outline with circles. You can make concentric circles inside to mark the stitch lines. I am using a 4″ hoop.	Fig 2: Start stitching the Turkey Rug Knot Stitch around the circle, starting from inside. You may do a few French knots in the center with a dark pink if you wish. I skipped that.
Fig 3: When you finish one circle, move to the next one. Keep the earlier stitches down with your thumb to help you with the current stitching.	Fig 4: Once finished, the stitches would look like this- pretty much a messy bunch of threads. Just spike it upwards with your fingers.
Fig 5: I had kept the length of the stitches long enough to allow me room to trim it comfortably to my desired length.	Fig 6: You can first cut all the stitch loops and then trim, or just start trimming right away, as I did.
Fig 7: My trimmed flower looks like this.	Fig 8: Happy with my first flower, I work on the other two.
Fig 9: All are trimmed and ready to get some leaves.	Fig 10: I added some leaves to make it look prettier. The stems are made of Outline Stitch and the leaves are made using Lazy Daisy Stitch.

TIPS to make your flowers beautiful:

1. Make concentric circles for the stitch lines.
2. Keep the length of the loops long enough for a comfortable trim.
3. Use 6 strands of thread for a denser look.