Mornu - Embroider your life: techniques + motifs + inspiration: simple techniques & 150 stylish motifs to embellish your world

BENTWOOD hoops

These grip fabric tighly. Buy the high-quality, expensive type; youre likely to find them only online. The cheap ones sold in craft stores wont hold the fabric taut enough.

FABRIC

Fabric is the foundation on which you draw with thread. The looser its weave, the easier it will be to pull the needle and floss through, and therefore the easier to embroider on.

Choosing fabric

You can embroider on any cloth short of tulle (the netting on tutus) and fabrics with pile, like velvet and corduroy. Thats because tulle is more air than fiber, and because embroidery stitches will get buried in the short, projecting threads of the velvet pile and become invisible. Select a fabric that can support the weight of your stitches. Heavy thread will cause lightweight cloth like lawn to pucker around it, while light thread work on heavy material like upholstery fabric or canvas may barely appear visible.

Wash fabric before use

New fabrics are treated with a product that keeps them looking crisp on the bolt. You dont want that chemical in your embroidery because it breaks down fibers over time. New fabrics may also shrink when washed. Its heartbreaking to spend all that time embroidering, then wash the embroidery later only to find it ruined because the foundation fabric shrunk. So wash all new fabrics before you embroider, to pre-shrink them and remove all chemicals. Its fine to put cotton in the dryer, but hang wool and linen on a line to dry.

Fabric types

Any fabric without pile (soft threads pointing up, like on velvet) is fair game as a surface for embroidery.

Linen. For centuries, embroidery was traditionally stitched on linenwhich is made from the flax plantpartly because it was one of the earliest woven fabrics and easier to grow than cotton, and partly for its durability, crispness, lovely drape, and the cool feel of it in the hand. Linen production is labor-intensive, making it a pricy fabric.

Cotton. Cotton fabric is popular for embroidery because its inexpensive, easy to source, and comes in a rainbow of shades as well as prints, which you can embroider on as long as you select a thick enough floss in a color that stands out.

Wool and felt. Wool has a wonderfully rich feel, and looks very lush when embroidered with wool crewel yarn. Felt is a non-woven wool fabric. With its fuzziness and association with childhood, it lends a playful feel to crafts, which may be why its so popular for embroidered patches. The felt sold in most craft stores is polyester with a patchy thickness that looks cheap and tears easily. Try to find wool or wool blends instead.