The crazy Beautiful world of me :)

Introduction:

Embroidery is a craft that uses thread to decorate fabric (and other materials). It’s a great way to spruce up a garment, customise objects, and to hide mends you’ve made!

Embroidery is usually done with embroidery floss, but depending on the base material you’re working on, you could also use yarn, ribbons, or plain old sewing thread. Don’t be afraid to experiment!

Embroidery is easier to do on taut fabric than limp fabric. That’s why most people use embroidery hoops. While not strictly necessary, a hoop will make your life so much easier.

Using the right needle will help, too. Use a crewel needle if you’re working with embroidery floss, a chenille needle if you’re working with ribbon or yarn, or a tapestry needle if you’re doing cross-stitch embroidery on open-weave fabrics.

While there are many types of embroidery from all over the world, this post will focus on some basic stitches you can use in your own work.

Basic embroidery stitches:

For a more thorough overview of embroidery stitches, check out these embroidery tutorials by Mary Corbet’s Needle ‘n Thread.

The following images show some of the most basic stitches:

(Image source)

The 16 stitches in the images above can be combined into any shape or form you want. You might recognise some from my hand sewing post: embroidery is a type of hand sewing, after all.

You don’t need to know all of these to be able to make beautiful things. Even just one of these is a great start for a project.

This sampler by Sew Nancy shows how these basic stitches can be used to outline shapes or form flowers, for example.

(Image source)

Fiorelila used a combination of the stem stitch, satin stitch, lazy daisy, and french knots to spruce up this sweater:

(Image source)

And this person used lazy daisies to add some flair to their jeans:

(Image source)

Embroidery for visible mending:

Embroidery is a useful tool to hide mends you’ve made, or to even accentuate them if that’s your style. This is called visible mending. While this is a topic that deserves a post on its own, here are some quick examples:

Like this fix by Redditor Takemythyme who embroidered a rose over a hole in a knit fabric:

(Image source)

Or like how this person has spruced up their jeans repairs with embroidery:

(Image source)

In this example, The Woolery Guy chose to use flower embroidery to make a hole in a knit fabric look like it was there by design:

(Image source)

For more examples, check out Pinterest or VisibleMending.com.

Conclusion:

Embroidery is a useful skill to give new life to your wardrobe. You can use it to give some flair to items you’ve grown bored off, or even to mend your clothes.

Once you’ve got a few basic stitches under your belt, the possibilities are endless. Be creative and have fun with it!

This is the worst thing I've ever discovered. it's going to be so detrimental to me.

http://www.antiquepatternlibrary.org/

It has every antique hobby I'm interested in, in one place. FOR FREE!!!!

You're welcome

Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.” 

“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”

“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”

It’s just. 

So ancient Roman statues have some really weird hairstyles. Archaeologists just couldn’t figure them out. They didn’t have hairspray or modern hair bands, or elastic at all, but some of these things defied gravity better than Marge Simpson’s beehive.

Eventually they decided, wigs. Must be wigs. Or maybe hats. Definitely not real hair.

A hairdresser comes a long, looks at a few and is like, “Yeah, they’re sewn.”

“Don’t be silly!” the archaeologists cry. “How foolish, sewn hair indeed! LOL!”

So she went away and recreated them on real people using a needle and thread and the mystery of Roman hairstyles was solved.