How to get started

What you need:

Good craftsmanship starts with good tools. Therefore, we recommend that you start by spending some of your pocket money on acquiring yourself:

A small selection of needles with and without tip
A dot stick
Tracing paper
Transfer color
Embroidery hoops sizes 13 and 18
Embroidery scissors

Maybe you have already inherited a little from your grandmother or another good woman – take good care of these precious items!

Should you be missing some items, you can take a look in our shop. With these items we can get very far. If you start from scratch, we at Tille’s have a nice little starter kit that gets you started easily and quickly.

You will find it in the shop:

Location of the subject:

Always start by considering where the subject should be placed on your fabric. If you sew by counting stitch pattern technique, it can be an advantage to sew helping threads in the fabric. That way, the center of the fabric is located, and then you can count yourself to where your embroidery should start. With helping threads, you can easily check that you are sewing exactly according to your pattern.

Fabric and thread must fit together

You will get the best result if you choose to embroider with a thread that suits the properties of the fabric. This means that the stronger the fabric you embroider on, the stronger the thread you will need to use.

Frame or no frame?

For some techniques, it may be a good idea to tension the fabric up in a sewing frame. As a rule of thumb, you can keep in mind that techniques where you sew one stitch in two workflows, it can be an advantage to use the sewing frame. A good example is spreading or speckling.

If you sew petit points on, for example, linen canvas, you can prevent the fabric from being skewed by using a sewing frame.

Techniques where one stitch is sewn in one session are best sewn without a sewing frame. For example, contour stitching.

Pattern transfer:

Magic pen – FriXion pen

If you need to embroider a not too small and detailed embroidery – you can draw the pattern up with a Penol FriXion pen. If you have a lightbox, it can be an advantage to put the subject under your fabric and draw directly. Alternatively, daylight and windows can also be used. Remember that your drawing disappears when exposed to heat, e.g. from an iron!

Dot transfer

This method can be used for transfer on most substances. With this technique, the subject is dotted through tracing paper, where by patterns appear as small holes in the paper.

Lay tracing paper over the subject you want to transfer and fix it with tape so that it does not move along the way.
Dot with a dot stick to create an evenly perforated line that follows the pattern. Use a soft surface, such as a cutting surface. Now the subject must be transferred to the fabric you want to embroider on. For this, a not too thin solution with ultramarine blue oil color and odorless petroleum is used. The color is transferred with a brush, sponge or gauze spout. To ensure that color has passed through all the holes in the tracing paper, an eraser is used to work the color all the way down into the holes.

It is a good idea to practice this technique before transferring to the fabric you want to embroider on.

The tracing paper is cleaned with odorless kerosene and a piece of paper towel.

Most embroideries will not cover the blue color 100% – therefore put the finished work in clear vinegar until the blue color one disappears – then it can be rinsed up and pressed.

Inspiration

Once you have gotten off to a good start – a number of questions naturally arise. Click through our Tips & inspirations – then you will get new inspiration and maybe answers to what you are looking for.

There are a multitude of facebook groups that are all about embroidery. “Broderi for sjov” is one among many – try it!