Leaping Hare by Barbara Kershaw

Barbara Kershaw’s expertise and experience as a whitework embroidery designer and teacher, shine bright in this utterly charming sachet featuring Casalguidi embroidery.

Her combination of stitch choices with the small size of the embroidered panel makes the Leaping Hare a delightful piece with which to venture into the world of Casalguidi embroidery, as well as being a fabulous gift idea.

The centerpiece of the project is the beautiful, textured panel and elegant, raised motif, both of which are characteristic of Casalguidi embroidery.

Casalguidi embroidery is named after a village in the Tuscan countryside where it was developed, taught and became a cottage industry in the years prior to World War I. The texture is created with a variety of stitches and techniques, combining counted work, needlelace and surface embroidery including the Casalguidi stitch, which is similar to raised stem stitch.

Casalguidi stitch is usually worked over string padding for a very highly raised motif, however Barbara designed the body of the leaping hare without the padding. Casalguidi stitch alone gives sufficient height for this design. The hare is ingeniously finished with a needlelace triangle for the head, a double blanket stitch bar for each leg, a needlewoven picot for each ear and a looped bullion knot tail.

The traditional, textured panel, across which the hare leaps, is worked with four-sided stitch filling and is echoed in the architectural border that surrounds the panel. The border is filled with straight stitches forming crosses and finished at each corner with needleweaving.

There is plenty of stitching variety to enjoy with this project, and if you are unfamiliar with some of the stitches, there are step-by-step guides to help you work through them, including the background stitching, elements of the hare as well as the peahole hem stitch that finishes the upper edge of the sachet. Both the embroidered panel and upper band are charted, so you can accurately replicate Barbara’s design.

We loved turning down the upper section of Barbara’s sachet to form a pretty cuff, but you can leave it unturned, making the sachet ideal for hanging in your wardrobe. You can easily adjust the length of the sachet if preferred – simply tweak the height of the sachet border by reducing the number of stitches worked along the sides.

You could even make a square, enclosed pincushion or lavender sachet, featuring the charted panel and omitting the upper band. Wouldn’t you love to see one of those each time you opened a drawer? All this with a piece of linen fabric and one perlé cotton thread!

Sometimes you only need a few materials to learn something new and create a lovely gift for the stitchworthy people in your life – and don’t forget, that includes you!

Step 1 – Purchase Project Instructions

Leaping Hare by Barbara Kershaw is a pretty linen sachet with a leaping hare worked in Casalguidi embroidery.

Step 2 – Purchase Ready-To-Stitch Kit

The Inspirations Ready-To-Stitch kit for Leaping Hare includes everything you need to re-create this sweet sachet: Fabrics (unprinted), embroidery threads and needles.