Have you noticed that embroidery isn’t just for crafts–it is making a big appearance in fashion? I’ve seen lots of it lately! It’s good to know that you don’t have to go out and spend lots of money to get some new clothing items with embroidery on them, because you can DIY it. It’s easy to design embroidery stitches! Let’s look specifically at how you can embroider letters and add monograms to your jeans, shirts, or bags, or whatever strikes your fancy! This is a great guide to embroidery for beginners. I love these embroidery craft hacks!
For all your hand embroidery needs, visit Michaels. You’ll find hoops, needles, and embroidery floss in every color. It’s also a great idea to grab some plain muslin to practice on before you embroider your chosen item of clothing.
Familiarize yourself with basic embroidery stitches, such as the running stitch, backstitch, and stem stitch. You’ll find a link at the end of this post with some good tutorials. Note that stem stitch is the stitch used for the cursive lowercase letters in the picture above.
The best thing about embroidering your own letters is that you aren’t limited to any one design. Hand draw your own, or find a fun font. To find a font you like, just open up a word processing application and play around with the fonts you find there. Print up what you like and use a light box to transfer chosen letters to fabric. Use a practice fabric to try out different stitches in the font you like, and see what you like best.
As a guide, the stitches used in this example, from top to bottom, are:
- back stitch
- stem stitch
- split stitch
- running stitch
Note that the stem stitch and split stitch give a nice raised appearance to the letters, with stem stitch looking like a twisted rope. Can you tell which is my favorite?
For more on embroidery stitches and lettering, click the following links:
Craftsy top 10 embroidery stitches
Craftsy how to embroider letters
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