Embroidery Tips: Plant a Wooly Garden on Your Favorite Knits

I have never really been an embroiderer. I often admire it from afar: I love the detail held in tiny stitches, and the magic of combining drawing with thread and fabric. Embroidery is an additive that makes me do a double-take; it’s a special addition, especially when done by hand. Each embroidered stitch added to a thrifted, reclaimed, mended, or handmade garment elevates it past ordinary and into a category of “one-of-a-kind.”

I’d tried embroidery myself a few times. Once, I sketched out a fruit bat in full color, each stitch a scratching line from point to point. Another time, I attempted visible mending on a few shirts and jeans, with varying degrees of success. I have struggled through learning French Knots, and I’ve eyed books that walk you through complete samplers. But eventually, I would always return to more familiar crafts. Embroidery seemed like something I needed to put more time into to learn, and I simply didn’t have the time to pursue it.

Until Luisetta.

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Know Thyself

I spend a lot of time thinking about the type of designer that I am and what kind of designer I am not. I’m not a lots-of-cables designer. I’m not into difficult stitches; intricate lace; brioche; or technical, unusual construction. I like my projects to be straightforward. I get bogged down by too much complexity, and that removes some of the joy from the process for me. I like something I can work on intermittently and keep shaping over time.

At some point, I started collecting inspiration for what I think of as “compartmentalized” embroidery, or “sketchbook” embroidery. These pieces felt less official than the highly skilled embroidery designs that I coveted from runway shows. They felt personal, private, more “art” coded—like projecting doodles off a page and onto a wearable object. These designs paralleled my interest in hand-painted tiles, specifically diamond- and square-based tiles, and set off what would become the basic structure for the Luisetta Vest.

Check out Hannah's Pinterest board to see some of the embroidered inspiration she collects!

Planting a Wooly Garden

The Luisetta Vest (named for a family relative and pronounced lew-setta) is a simple shape designed to act as a canvas for embroidery. The shape itself doesn’t take center stage, but the all-over cabling gives you distinct areas in which to create your stitches. As I worked on each embroidered flower, I spent time thinking about the little things that grow in my yard and garden. I imagined eventually filling every space on the sweater with its own sweet little floral, arranged randomly, and added one at a time to create a growing, blooming representation of my own expanding embroidery skills.

Hannah began sketching the flowers in her garden by simplifying each flower into basic shapes.

In embroidery, the stitches are doing far more work than the sketches. You’ll note by looking at the sketches for Luisetta’s embroideries that they’re very simple—lines and circles and dots. When I began to draw each flower, I worked first on simplifying it down to its base shapes. This actually made it easier for me to stitch them into being and have them turn out as expected in the finished garment. Using a fluffier strand of wool instead of a traditional embroidery thread helped the designs feel cohesive against the fabric, and hid a lot of my beginner mistakes.

My number one piece of advice for those of you who want to start embroidering on your knits: Be fearless and don’t be afraid to mess it up. A lot of the charm comes from the stitches feeling less than perfect.

Hannah's swatch that she used to practice her embroidery designs. Hannah recommends practicing your stitches on a swatch to get a feel for the materials. Photo by Hannah Thiessen Howard

Hannah's Top Tips for Tackling Embroidery:

1. Use a stabilizer. This makes a massive difference in how your work looks, both while you stitch and after washing. Without stabilizer, your stitches will pull the knit out of shape and potentially tighten some areas, while other areas will be looser. With stabilizer, you’re able to work directly on top of your drawing, and the backing paper/film washes away in your blocking bath. There are quite a few different kinds of wash-away stabilizer, so you'll be able to find several options for your particular project.

2. Practice first. In the pattern, I recommend knitting a large swatch to create a smaller sampler for you to practice on. While I don’t think you need to practice every embroidery pattern before you add it to your vest, it really helped me get a feel for the material by practicing on my swatch.

Wash-away stabilizer on a roll for use with wool embroideries. Photo by Hannah Thiessen Howard

3. Simplify your ideas. Lines, dots, and circles—that’s all you need to get going! Draw something simple and start there. With embroidery, it’s easier to add than take away (and seam ripping on top of a knitted fabric is stressful). This is somewhere else your stabilizer helps: it’s easier to rip out stitches if they’ve been separated from the knitted fabric for you!

4. Get yourself a needle threader. My biggest annoyance when embroidering was threading my pointy, wide-eye embroidery needle with fingering-weight Shetland from Harrisville Designs Shetland. You can solve part of this problem by using a needle threader, or you can use a smaller bit of thread (such as the sewing thread that you’ll use to baste on your stabilizer) to pull the yarn through the eye of the needle. I saved so much time once I stopped wrestling with the needle and used a threader.

Hannah's collection of Harrisville Shetland colors. Hannah decided to use fluffier strands of wool instead of traditional embroidery thread to help the embellishments feel more cohesive against the knitted fabric. Photo by Hannah Thiessen Howard

You will absolutely get into a flow, and before you know it, your vest will be filling up with beautiful designs. I have so many ideas for how to customize this vest in different ways, and I’m actually planning to make several more with variations in the diamonds: snowflakes, quilt-inspired motifs, and seashells all seem like beautiful opportunities for visual collection. In this way, Lusietta becomes a curio cabinet kind of project, and I hope other knitters will find the same joy I have in exploring the possibilities!

Subscribers can find the Luisetta Vest pattern in the Farm & Fiber Knits Library.