At the Charlotte (NC) guild meeting tonight, Ellen Guerrant was the speaker and she had several hand quilted pieces where she had used an unusual hand quilting stitch. Someone in the group called it rice-ing? I couldn't figure out who said it or I would have asked her for more information. Ellen said she didn't have a name for it.
It looks sort of like small and random herringbone stitches. It was very random and looked great. It could be a great compromise between tedious hand stitching and cumbersome machine quilting. I'll have to look in my embroidery books and see if I see something similar, but I am wondering if anyone here has heard of it, used it, etc?

I have. The random pattern comes from the random pattern in Japanese rice bowls. It is a Shibori type of design.

It is straight stitches in a random manner, going in every direction.

hummm, sounds interesting

scroll down to Cross Stitch Variations

http://www.fidella.com/webstitch/needle_stitch.html

How large do they do this stitch? Inquiring minds! :D

If you google quilting and "komezashi" you come up with some interesting patterns using the rice stitch. I couldn't find a book o it, though I suspect I could find one in Japanese.

Rachel

Konbanwa, well, there you go! I am a nut about all thing Japanese.

on this site they show two variations. the link above shows the cross stitch version. on the same list if you scroll down to:
Isolated and Detatched or Open Filling stitches then look at
Seeding Stitch (aka Simple Knot Stitch, Rice Grain, speckling stitch, isolated stitch German:Samenstich) you'll see the simpler version of the rice grain stitch...more open and random than the cross stitch.

Interesting looking stitch.

Ahhh...thanks so much for the help. The simple seeding stitch looks like the one she used. I really like the idea for hand quilting. I was not able to see the photos on Susan Briscoe's blog showing the komezashi stitch.