Embroidery Term: The Jump Stitch

Jennifer Stern, contributor

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See the arrows indicating the stitching that is is caught under the embroidery?  That is a jump stitch.

Photo: Len Hasemann

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Have you ever watched a design stitch out and noticed that the needle drags the thread along with it as it fills in portions of a design that are the same color? The thread that connects one embroidered section to another is called a jump stitch. These “stitches” need to be carefully trimmed when the embroidery is finished.

Jump stitches or the lack of them is directly related to how the design was digitized (or created). As a digitizer, I have learned how to create embroidery designs with few or no jump stitches to trim. When I first started digitizing my own designs, it would take me longer to trim all the jump stitches than it would to stitch out the entire design! As I got better, I learned ways to eliminate the number of jump stitches by “walking” the thread under parts of a design that would stitch out later.

If you are downloading free designs from the internet, I suggest that you always test stitch before you use it on something important. One of the things you can look for is how many jump stitches you’ll have to trim. If you are going to be stitching the design over and over, it can create a lot of extra work to have to trim a lot of unnecessary jump stitches. Another problem with jump stitches is that they can get caught under parts of the embroidery, making them hard to get at. The pictured jump stitch was impossible to get out…I tried!

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