Just started hand embroidery and looking for some tips to make your new fave hobby even easier? Here are some things I wish I had known when I first started!
Embroidery Tip 1: Keep your fabric tight in the hoop!
To kick off your project, one of the first things you’ll want to do is pop your fabric into an embroidery hoop. Make sure it’s super tight—think of it like stretching a drum skin! Keep an eye on it and re-tighten as you go. Trust me, saggy fabric is the enemy of neat stitches!
Embroidery Tip 2: Thread quality matters
Much like cheap hoops, cheaper embroidery thread can suck. Cheap thread can be coarse, rough and split easily.
Personally, I always reach for DMC stranded cotton, which is still pretty budget friendly (Wool Warehouse sell it for 99p a skein) and worth buying instead of cheap multipacks you find in craft stores. It’s 100 cotton that's mercerized twice to give it a sheen – it glides through your fabric really nicely and doesn’t hurt your wallet too much.
Embroidery Tip 3: Where to start
If, like me, you have come to embroidery after other crafts, you’ll be used to a pattern having a pre-determined starting point. After learning cross stitch where a pattern typically starts in the middle, I expected embroidery to have a similar rule.
This is actually rarely the case and, usually, you can start wherever you fancy! If a pattern has overlapping elements, I will normally start with objects in the background and work towards the foreground, but otherwise, you can just pick whichever part you fancy and work in whatever order you feel like, whether that’s section by section or colour by colour.
If you’d like to remove the decision of where to start, most of my embroidery kits and patterns include a suggested stitching order, just to help you get started instead of worrying about how to do so.
Embroidery Tip 4: Don’t use too much thread at once
Embroidery thread comes in one big ol’ long skein and needs to be cut down into sections before you thread your needle. It can be tempting to whack a long piece of thread on your needle so you don’t have to switch it out as often but, trust me, this doesn’t always make life easier and instead causes more frequent knots and tangles.
Use your arm as a guide for how much to cut off and use – hold the thread with your finger and thumb and then pull back to just past your elbow – this is how much to use at once. For me, that’s around 50-60cm.
Embroidery thread is also made up of six strands twisted together, so don’t forget to check your pattern to see how many strands to separate and use! It is very rare to need all 6 at once.
Embroidery Tip 5: Untwist your threads
One small tip that makes a big difference is to untwist your threads from each other and then put them back together before threading your needle. Even if you magically separate the exact number you need in one go, separating the strands one by one will make your stitches neater and lay flatter.
The way thread is manufactured means those six strands are all wound around one another so if you leave them as they are, they will look twisted in your work. This especially makes a difference with satin stitch.
I hope these tips enhance your embroidery experience! Happy stitching, and feel free to share your own tips or any projects you're working on!
Happy stitching!
Sara xo
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