How To Embroider

Hi, I'm Roz. I'm the owner of Sew Much Fun, where I love to share my knowledge and enthusiasm for sewing. So, when you are going to do some embroidery, what I advise you do, is you draw a little drawing, a very basic drawing of what you want to do and the size that you want to work with.

Then, we're going to transfer that drawing onto your fabric, and you're going to need to do this by putting it up to a window. I can roughly remember, what the design is. So I'm using an invisible pen to sort of transfer the shape that I want to do, just a few little embroidery stitches with.

Nice and small, and this invisible pen will either disappear within 24 hours, or it will disappear when you wash it. I've also had previous experience that it disappears very quickly, before 24 hours, so be very careful only to use it immediately before you're going to sew with it. So what I'm going to do next is I'm going to put a little embroidery hoop on top of my design, just trapping it.

My hoop has got one hoop that goes inside the other. I'm going to trap my design in my little hoop like that, and that's going to hold my fabric nice and taut, so it's easy for me to work with. Then I'm going to use embroidery thread, and embroidery thread comes in thread like this, and it has 6 strands.

And what we're going to do with this design is we're going to actually split the 6 strands into 2 lots of 3. Now, the whole idea of embroidery thread is that you can basically use it at any thickness that you want to, for whichever project. So, I normally use either 2 strands or 3 strands, it depends very much on what I'm doing.

So on this little design, I'm going to, first of all, do a satin stitch. So, I've threaded my needles already, and I've done a knot on the back of my thread. And the satin stitch is just basically a long stitch that helps me build up a shape.

So, the middle of my little flower here, I want to have yellow, and I just keep building it up from one side of my little circle to the other, or just nice and flat stitches. Okay? So what you would do is just continue doing that until you have a lovely circle shape, or the shape you particularly desire. So that is a great stitch, the satin stitch is a great stitch as a filling-in stitch.

The other stitch I'm going to show you is another long stitch. I've got to do a double knot on the end. Again, a nice, long, straight stitch.

Again, most embroidery stitches are either straight stitches or stitches made from loops, so this is another long, straight stitch, but you can see how it starts to make just those little lines look like a bit of grass. Another very useful stitch is backstitch. Backstitch is a very good stitch for doing solid lines or shapes.

I'm going to come up, and I'm going to go backwards and then forwards, so it's like a seesawing action. It's a very nice and quick stitch to do. And again, I can follow my nice line, that's already beginning to fade, but I can start getting a nice little stem stitch coming out.

And then the other ideal stitch for making little flower shapes is, of course, the chain stitch, which, again, is a stitch with a loop. So, again, we come up, but we come back down, and up again, but we loop our thread around it, and then we stake our stitch back down again. So this makes nice little petal shapes.

So you're going to come up, then come around, then we come down. And then you continue doing all the different stitches to finish off your design.