Embroidery on clothes is a wonderful way to embellish plain clothes or fabrics. Once you know a few embroidery stitches, you can transform a boring piece of clothing into something awesome and very special.
Compared to other craft forms, embroidery doesn’t require much tools or materials. All you need is thread, a hoop, a needle, some scissors, a tailors pencil for drawing a design onto the fabric or some transfer material if you want to transfer images to fabric.
There are lots of threads to choose from, cotton, silk, rayon, thick and thin. I like shiny so I chose rayon and silk threads in strong colours. I buy my threads at Stef Francis a small family-owned business, that sells hand-dyed yarns, threads, fibres and fabrics.
You can draw directly onto the fabric with a special tailor’s pencil, the marks from these pencils brush away when you’re finished.
If you want to transfer images to the fabric you can use water-soluble stabilizers. It’s transparent like tracing paper but dissolves quickly in water.
Once you have your design on fabric, you can start stitching. For this dress, I used only one stitch, the chain stitch.
I have an embroidery Pinterest board with lots of inspiration to give you an idea of what is possible.
