An Embroidery Renaissance

Handbag with crewel embroidery

There was an article (printed from the AP wire) recently in one of our regional newspapers about the return of interest in embroidery. As someone who never lost interest in the needle arts, I found this very encouraging. The author said that the new embroideries are, in some ways, less about decoration than in past decades, and that they tend more toward slogans and expressions of personal choice and opinion. There's certainly nothing wrong with that. Tee shirts and sweatshirts have been doing that for some time. Some of the designs were described as whimsical or comical. (The only problem I see in that is that — if you want to sell your needlework — you must be careful not to use a design based on copyrighted characters like those in Disney cartoons or syndicated comic strips.) A lot of the work was called very individualistic. As you know, I always encourage you readers to use the techniques you learn to create something which is uniquely your own. Even when I provide a pattern, I try to describe how you can vary it greatly in color, stitches, background material, etc.

Mittens with embroidered cuffs

The article mentioned a resurgence in the use of embroidery on clothing, something I have been doing for most of my life. It began when my parents sold the farm and we moved to an acreage at the edge of town. I went from a one-room school with fewer than a dozen students to a large school and a sixth-grade class with thirty other students — all of whom were at least a year older than me. I was a good student and worked hard, which pleased my teachers. I got along well with the boys in my class because I had skills they appreciated: I could milk cows, drive a team of mules, ride goats, catch frogs and play marbles with the best of them. Some of the girls, however, were unpleasant. For the first time in my life, I encountered prejudice and an effort to exclude me from the group. They sneered and looked with scorn at my name, my braided hair, my homemade clothes and the built-up shoe I wore because polio had left me with a limp.

Most of those things I could not change, but I could do something about my clothes. I fought back against their insults with my needle. My mother made most of my dresses from print flour or chicken-feed sacks. We began making ones where the skirts were print and the tops were of a plain-colored cotton that matched a color in the print. When the dress was finished, I would draw some part of the print on the collar or bodice and embroider it. No one else had dresses like that. I embroidered the cuffs of my ankle socks or sewed lace around the edges and put contrasting ruffles on the hems of my skirts. I had socks with eyelets and every day I laced them with ribbons that matched the ones on my braids. I turned pretty buttons into jewelry and learned a dozen ways to wear the scarves I hemmed from colorful fabric remnants. I never copied their styles of clothing; by the time we moved on to junior high school, they were copying mine!

Plain purple sweatshirt for the embroidery project below

If you are just beginning to experiment with decorated clothing, I recommend starting with a plain sweatshirt, as shown in the next photos. They are inexpensive and easy to obtain. (You can even practice on an old one if you choose.) Some craft shops sell them just for decorating. The fabric is sturdy and washable. Your stitches on the back of the cloth will not show through, even if you knot your threads (something I recommend on anything that will get hard wear and/or frequent washings). You can use floss or yarn or even crochet cotton for the stitches. (My only caution is not to pull your stitches so tight that you pucker the fabric.) Besides embroidery, you can use other techniques such as applique, machine embroidery, and trapunto. You have already learned how to make a hot-iron transfer for use on light-colored garments in the post about basic blackwork (October 6, 2013) and a way to transfer a design onto a dark-colored ones by stitching through the paper pattern (March 8, 2015). There are a number of other transfer techniques you can use.

Sweatshirt embroidery of an iris, in progress

Embroidered slippers from Hungary

Children's clothing is another easy area in which to begin embroidering. Little folks like pictures on their clothing and aren't very critical about technique. Easy designs like the ones on the Holbein embroidery downloadable pattern (August 20, 2014) can be done quickly. I recommend basting a piece of non-woven interfacing to the back of the fabrics — especially knits — before you begin embroidering. This makes the embroidered area stronger and less likely to pull out of shape when it is washed (and hides those knots at the ends of your threads).

Try it! Have fun,

One of Annake's appliqued sweatshirts

 This post by Annake's Garden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.