It seems I am big in to my embroidery hoops right now. When my (big) little brother’s birthday came around, I couldn’t resist…

The story of this project actually starts back in February, when the same little brother bought me the Sublime Stitching CraftPad for my birthday. I was extremely excited, since I’d had my eye on the website for a while but hadn’t gotten around to ordering anything (well done brother!)

The pad is packed full of designs and, as the website points out, these ain’t your gramma’s embroidery. Pinup girls and flamingos, sailor tattoos and fortune tellers, it’s full of weird and wacky stuff you (or at least I) instantly want to embroider on to everything.

For Liam I picked a design of two Lucha libre masks, with a comic-book style POW between them. The transfers were a breeze to use. First you cut out the designs you want, and decide where you’re going to put them.  Next (an important tip, included with the transfers) you iron the fabric where you’re going to place the transfers, to warm it up. This makes them adhere better. Then you just pop the transfer on, iron over and voila. The lines are nice and clear but thin enough to cover with a single line of stitching – perfect.

Jenny, the founder of Sublime Stitching, has a whole bunch of easy-to-follow hand embroidery tutorials on her site, which I’d used for previous hoops. If you want to have a go, I highly recommend having a look at these first! I used a combination of back stitch, satin stitch, split stitch and even threw in a few french knots for good measure (those are the little spots on the blue/red guy).

If there’s one thing I’d do differently it’s use a slightly thicker cotton fabric. As you can see from the closeup, you can make out a few thread tails when you look carefully. Lesson learned for next time. Little brother didn’t seem to mind though, and promised it’ll have pride of place in his new flat.

xx