Double CRAW my new favorite stitch!

Wait is that a trick question.  If you know my work you’re likely to get the correct answer of CRAW, but now there is Double CRAW and it’s my new favorite.

My friend  Sabine graciously calls me the Godmother of Double Craw but it all came from her brain.  I just had the good fortune to witness the excitement as the stitch got developed.  We were at an event in Florida together when we stole a few minutes of beading time together and she introduced me to her new stitch.  I was enamored immediately and began stitching my first sampler rope changing up the colors and coupling the dcraw units with craw between.

Best of all, the concept was easy to grasp and lent itself to many design options.  So what is it about the anatomy of this stitch that I love.  Well first up it’s very structurally sound.  With a minimum of tension you can create a very sturdy self supporting element.  Next up is the color play.  I like to think of it as color complexity.  In a very small space I can include 3 colors easily and even more given it’s next attribute.  Each of the walls of the cube is made up of 4 core beads and 4 corner beads.  The core beads are not shared, only the corner beads.  This means each face of the cube could conceivably be a different color. So if the floor and ceiling core beads are one color (pink here), the corner beads are a second color (bronze here) and the core beads are each a different color (here I used one color the turquoise) that would potentially be 6 colors in one little cube. Besides the color play possibilities the stitch also lends itself to moving between DCRAW, CRAW and PRAW seamlessly.  Here I’ve taken a craw rope in 11’s and added a DCRAW unit done all in 8’s.  I love the way it differentiates from the rope and adds such a fun element.

Sadly I have to be a bit of a tease as my next design is made using all of the attributes of DCRAW I’ve just described, but it’s not quite ready for it’s beauty shot or it’s unveiling, for that you’ll have to wait.

What’s your favorite stitch and what attributes would describe that make it your favorite.