Embroidery Designs Guide

United Arab Emiratie Zareena showcased the true Arab, Pashno cultural embroidery patterns in the recent Dubai fest. The hallmark of her collection are the lush embroideries on single one-piece gowns. Blending old, vintage Afghani references, Zareena uses the thread zari and the gotha (the metallic fabric used richly in Indian wear) as well as luxurious crepes and chiffons to accentuate the sparkle in her embroidery. Every piece is distinct and different from the previous piece and in this lies her excellence. The bejewelled embroideries are made to perfection and have fans raving for more of her collection. Her firm belief is that simplicity is the essence of beauty and all her collections derive their elegance from their clean cuts coupled with a rich look.

‘I await inspiration. I do not plan it,’ she explains. ‘It could be a simple piece of jewellery that might take my fancy and become an inspiration for an entire collection.’

Married with two daughters, Zareena has successfully launched and maintained three businesses with the support of her husband, Colonel Mohammed Murad. She looks towards India for inspiration due to its age old tradition and culture. She has started an enterprise in Delhi with a team of designers and embroidery craftsmen. Her endeavors include a well-known beauty salon and a wedding events management company. She juggles between family life and her career and maintains a healthy balance between the two. ‘Without harmony at home, a woman cannot achieve heights. My family is my strength,’ she points out.

EDG wishes her all the best in her bejewelled embroidered life!

I just came across a good resource for shopping of some essential embroidery supplies. If you want to buy good quality hoops, stabilizers, thread or scissors visit Mr. Vac Mrs. Sew. The cat/hoop package includes prewound bobbins, scissors, thread for the Brother SE-270D, HE-120 and Innovis 500D. The Hat Hoop allows you the unique ability to embroider on the uncommon medium of a typical baseball style cap. The embroidery stork scissors looks really charming quite alike to the natural bird. This comes in handy for that fine detail work where the needle sharp point can reach where others can’t. This proves ideal for monogram work, applique, embroidery, ripping seams and trimming loose threads. This scissor is not only versatile but beautiful with it’s gorgeous engraved gold-plated stork design. The stabilizer comes under the brand name ‘Sulky’. We have various versions of the stabilizer which includes the Sticky Self-Adhesive 8.25 by 6 yards, Solvy water soluble stabilizer 8 by 9.5 yards, Soft n Sheer Cut Away 8 by 11 yards, Wash Away Tear Away stabilizer 15 by 25 yards. Depending on the particular embroidery, the necessary stabilizer can be taken up.

The Polystar threads with all 61 Brother colors especially produced for Brother Innovis embroidery machines are a specialty at the thread section. Apart from this, the Maderia embroidery thread package is a treat for the viewers!

We start a different series today… A series of famous embroiderers who have needled their way into the embroidery news of the world. They could be tutors on embroidery, writers of embroidery books, experts in embroidery digitizing software or plain and simple embroidery enthusiasts.

We start with Kathleen Bentley Tackett of Blaze Branch, Dorton who has developed an expertise in applique patterns. It is said that her applique finishes are so good, that the stitches seem to disappear like magic.  This is primarily due to the finesse skills garnered through her many years of practise.   As a child, her main motivation to take up sewing was her grandmother and in her own words: “I would stand at her sewing machine and watch her making pretty dresses for her daughters”. As a young woman, she worked towards getting a tailoring certificate and made the uniforms for the Virgie High School Band. She loved making complicated stuff. Four years ago she took up quilting with the help of her daughter’s quilting machine. They trade their talents with Kathleen doing the applique by hand and her daughter doing the quilting.

Kathleen has given a few remarkable appliques away to her loved ones : one to her granddaughter in California — “Basket of Roses”; one to her grandson — “Mexican Star”; and one to her grandddaughter in college — “Lavendar Tea.”

She is currently working on a “Through the Year with Sunbonnet Sue” quilt. It has 12 appliqued squares, one for each month. The patterns are made up of pieces of material in a variety of sizes, shapes and colors. July’s square is patriotic; February’s is Valentine’s Day; September’s shows Sunbonnet Sue on her way to school … and so on.

With over 20 quilts finished and two more started, Kathleen is always flooded with new ideas and new patterns. Besides those mentioned, she has made: “Devil on the Run,” “Flower Garden” (hand quilted by Pike County Quilt Guild member Zetta Mullins), “Cabin in the Woods,” “Chain of Jewels,” “Garnet Glaze,” “Courthouse Steps,” “Maggie’s Flower Garden,” “Christmas,” “Mystery Quilt,” “Storm at Sea,” “China Blue,” “Grandmother’s Flower Garden,” “Robert’s Flower Garden,” “Folk Art Freedom,” “Cathedral Window” and “Autumn.”

Kathleen belongs to the Pike County Quilt Guild that meets at the Pike County Extension Office and has also won a prize in the guild’s Hillbilly Quilt Show, in the Miscellaneous category.

Lets wish her the very best in her embroidering career ahead!

Brother International Corporation is one of the premier providers of products for the home, home office and office. Their U.S.A. corporate office located in New Jersey, was established on April 21, 1954 and markets many industrial products, home appliances, and business products manufactured by its parent company, Brother Industries, Ltd., of Nagoya, Japan. These products include an award-winning line of Multi-Function Center and printers.  They recently introduced C-Combo, a perfect lightweight compact embroidery machine.   The C-Combo line includes the Innov-is 900D and SE350. 

Some of the key highlights of the Innov-is 900D and SE350 include a backlit LCD Touch Screen, one-touch access to built-in designs including embroidery editing capabilities,  automatic Push-Button Thread Cutter, ease in cutting thread,  sixteen Built-in Languages,  precise translation of step-by-step instructions on the LCD panel,  memory Functions, embroidery Editing,  seventy Built-in Embroidery Designs and sixty-seven Built-in Stitch Functions including 10 styles of one-step, automatic buttonholes, built-in Card Slot,  popular 4″ x 4″ embroidery field and a quick-Set(TM) bobbin and Advanced Needle Threader.

The higher-featured Innov-is 900D includes the above features plus thirty-five built-in embroidery Designs based on Disney/Pixar characters,  computer connectivity for transfer of .pes files from a computer to the machine, my Custom Stitch(TM) feature, 3 sewing fonts,  62 additional decorative stitches, embroidery menu access for accessing the embroidery menu while in sewing mode to save time and plan future designs, the ability to read all embroidery cards featuring Disney/Pixar characters, protective Hard Cover and Accessory Box that fits under the free arm and a Sew Nice Pic(TM) frame.

Good things come in small packages…. every day!! Check out a free embroidery design every day at All Free Embroidery Designs.

Most of the designs are in pes embroidery format. The website also allows users to create their own account, log in and submit their free designs along with a link back.

I hail from the East of the World - India. I have been studying various hand embroidery designing techniques and I found it interesting to note how culture, history, background so strongly influences the very essence of these patterns.

The Western techniques are also influenced by the above parameters and techiques like cutwork, flipflop, corvette, mardi gras embroidery designs emerge out to the world!

In the Eastern, apart from India a treasure of traditional embroidery comes in from China.  China is the first country in the world that discovered the use of silk for hand silk embroidery.    Silkworms were domesticated as early as 5000 years ago.  The production of silk thread and fabrics gave rise to this beautiful art of embroidery. According to the classical Shangshu, the “regulations on costumes” of 4000 years ago stipulated among other things “dresses and skirts with designs and embroideries”.    In 1958 a piece of silk was found in a tomb of the state of Chu of the Warring Sates Period (475-221 B.C).  It is hand embroidered with a dragon-and-phoenix design.  More than 2000 years old, it is the earliest piece of Chinese embroidery ever unearthed.

In 2005, I wrote about Photo or Embroidery Design - Hunan Silk Embroidery. Today, silk embroidery is practised nearly all over China. The best commercial products, it is generally agreed, come from four provinces: Jiangsu (notably Suzhou), Hunan, Sichuan and Guangdong, each with its distinctive features.   Embroidered works have become highly complex and exquisite today. Take the double-face embroidered “Cat” you see next to this post, representative work of Suzhou embroidery. The artist splits the hair-thin coloured silk thread into filaments-half, quarter 1/12 or even 1/48 of its original thickness– and uses these in embroidering concealing in the process the thousands of ends and joints and making them disappear as if by magic. The finished work is a cute and mischievous-looking cat on both sides of the groundwork. The most difficult part of the job is the eyes of the cat. To give them lustre and life, silk filaments of more than 20 colours or shades have to be used.  Recently, on the basis of two-face embroidery have developed further innovations– the same design on both sides in different colours, and totally different patterns on the two faces of the same groundwork. It seems that possibilities hitherto unknown to the art are still to be explored.

The HUS machine embroidery format is well known to the modern embroiderer. What exactly is the history behind this relatively mysterious pattern.. Read on!

Husqvarna or Huskvarna was the name of a location in Sweden. It constituted the eastern part of Jönköping, the municipal seat of Jönköping Municipality, Sweden and had a population of about 21,500. Between 1911 and 1970 it used to be a city municipality of its own. There was a royal rifle manufacturer named after the city founded in Husqvarna in 1680 and lasted until 1757, when it was sold to private owners. It supplied the Swedish and Norwegian armies with rifles (for example, in 1870 some 10,000 rifles were finished). War time through, the same company later switched over in 1872 from crafting firearms to the production of sewing machines and bicycles.

Today, it is known as Husqvarna (it never changed the old spelling), an internationally known company with a variety of products. The machine embroidery formats that came through these sewing machines became known as the ‘HUS’ formats and is widely in use today.Secrets of Embroidery has some beautiful tutorials on Husqvarna/Viking by Carolyn Duncan. You could navigate through Tutorials on the home page and click on Husqvarna/Viking. These easy-to-understand guides prove beneficial since they enable you to harness the potential of your Designer sewing embroidery machine and gives you insights into 3D digitizing and sketch designs that form a hallmark of Huskvarna.

HUS is famous for its realistic embroidery designs and all patterns are accentuated and clear. The pussy cat portraits by Diana Kaufholz in Secrets of Embroidery display this feature (Navigate to ‘Designs by Category’ and click on Dianas Dezigns). Notice how the emotions/feelings of the cats are captured in these machine embroideries.

So, where are the freebies! You could go to Sewterific to download some cute free hus embroidery designs! The Mad flower next to this post is part of this collection.

What on earth are applique floral quilts? Well well, you have been missing out on some eye stopping embroidery designs if you haven’t come across these patterns till now.

A quilt is a type of bedding— a bed covering composed of a quilt top and a layer of fabric for backing. The two are secured by tying which is a technique of using thread, ribbon or yarn to pass through all 3 layers of the quilt at frequent intervals. These are strong bonds and hold on even when the quilt is being washed. Most quilts are decorative and find easy uses as wall hangings apart from the normal bedding. Over the years, attempts have been made to make this quilt look more and more exotic and flowers or animals have been frequently used to add a natural touch to the hand embroidery. Appliques florals are flowery designs sewed on a separate fabric which is then stitched on to the master quilt cloth.

If you would be interested to learn this art, we have for you a masterpiece book from Bonnie Lyn McCaffery called Fantasy Floral Quilts: Creating With Silk Flowers (That Patchwork Place). This book contains step by step instructions along with beautifully photographed quilt designs to help you on your way. The quilts here are made from fabric and silk flowers and embellished with glistening threads and beads. This is not a very easy art, but Bonnie with her easy-to-understand logical instructions makes applique floral quilting a breeze.

Cross stitch is one of the oldest embroidery stitches. It can be worked on canvas or even-weave fabrics so that the stitches are of the same size. If you cross a row of diagonal stitches in one direction with a second row of diagonal stitches in the opposite slanting direction, you get a cross stitch. All cross stitch patterns are by nature counted thread in nature. This is because if you need to get the correct embroidery design, the stitches should be correctly spread across the fabric. This is possible only by giving a count to each colour and direction. To take a simple example, if one wants to embroider the letter “A”, the number of cross stitches in the left leg of the letter should definitely match the right leg number.

Check out the Mona Lisa all done in cross stitch. Craft Conn has used 63 DMC colors for an accurate rendering of the famous Leonardi Da Vinci painting. Isn’t it a beauty?

Then you have various versions of the cross stitch like the alternating cross stitch where a row is skipped to give the cross an elongated look, the back stitch which ensures that the pattern can be used from both sides of the fabric, the rugged Brazilian cross stitch where two rows intersect to make the embroidery design more stable. The knitting stitch bears an unique resemblance to the regular knitting. Here the stitches are crossed in such a manner that the whole design looks well knit. This type of stitch is also called tapestry stitch. The Mexican cross stitch (also called the plaited stitch) consists of multiple diagonal rows that move parallelly to each other. These are complemented with multiple rows in the opposite direction. They meet at their respective centers to form diamond designs which also ensures the stability of the pattern.

If you want to learn cross stitch, check out Big Book of Cross-Stitch Design: Over 900 Simple-to-Sew Decorative Motifs by Readers Digest authors. If you need an encyclopedia on cross stitch that would adorn your library like a jewel, you must go in for 2001 Cross Stitch Designs: The Essential Reference Book (”Better Homes & Gardens”). This book has 2001 cross stitch designs for every occasion and category of stitching—holidays, alphabets, florals, nature, sports, children, babies, Christmas, animals, and numerous others. Each motif collection is accompanied by a clear and accurate color chart and color key and includes 50 specialty stitch diagrams with instructions.

What exactly is bead embroidery? This is an ancient hand embroidery technique which originated in Germany in the 12th century. The pattern was first drawn onto the parchment and then attached to the fabric. The beads were strung onto one single thread, laid on the design in the desired manner and then couched into place with a thread and second needle. So there was a juxtaposition between the beads and the embroidery and this unique technque came to be known as bead embroidery.

In today’s scenario, one generally takes 5 - 6 beeds on the needle at a time. The needle goes into the fabric and these beads are then couched with a second needle and thread into place. The backstitch technique is used in order to run through several of the couched beads. A final thread is run through to ensure stability of the embroidery design.

Check out the dragonfly which caught my eye in one of the beaded embroidery resources - Giuliana’s Beaded Embroidery - This embroidery is done with linen lined with muslin. The dragonfly body is done in clear silver-lined bugle beads, and the wings are solid silver metal Delica beads. The opaque purple beads are size 11/0 Japanese glass beads. Aren’t they a beauty!

There is an informative book on beaded embroidery by Sherry Serafini and you could read it -  The Art of Bead Embroidery: Techniques, Designs & Inspirations