B is for

...the buttonhole stitch!

This workhorse shows up everywhere. Of course it is used in handmade buttonholes, carefully encasing and reinforcing a knitted opening or the the raw edge of a cut opening. Worked closely together in this manner, it gets the job done without flair. But you can space the stitches out, you can vary the length, you can stitch them in a circle and it is just as useful as a decorative stitch and, as such, is a staple embroidery in crazy quilting and applique.

I use it most often in the edges of Hardanger embroidery.

It works just as hard in cutwork embroidery (example here); again encasing the raw edges and working the bars between motifs. The whitework of Broderie Anglaise has eyelets and small openings reinforced with delicate buttonhole stitches

And, if you remember from an earlier post seeing the beautiful work of Dorie Millerson, it is heavily used in needlelace also.

Of course B is for beads, too! I added a little beaded picot edge to a felt heart as a little thank you token to the stitcher coordinating the Love Quilt blocks.

Interesting (at least to me!) in that when I think of these alphabetic stringplay terms, I so far think only in relation to embroidery and not so much in knitting. Knitting is my most recent string obsession, so I suppose it has not had time to really sink in as deeply.