Honeycomb Embroidery Tutorials - Welcome

Welcome to the first in a series of mini embroidery tutorials, in which I will show you how to do some of my favourite embroidery stitches. I hope they will then become yours too. I’ve made them to be enjoyable as possible so that by the end of the year, you will have several stitches under your embroidered belt.

The designs have been made so that even if you only do one, you’re not left with yet another sample that floats about your house, but rather a piece of embroidery that can be done in an afternoon, if that, and immediately applied to something, like a quilt or whatever you fancy. 

One thing I also don't want to do is overwhelm you with the tutorials, so I am splitting everything out over several blog posts. The first will be looking at materials and colours, then the stitching, and finally the finishing off. There is nothing worse and a huge long blog post to scroll through. I also want you to read through the blog posts, gather what you need and then work on it when your ready to do it.

So grab yourself a cuppa, a pen and a notebook. 

Ready? Then let's begin.

For your first tutorial your going to looking at eyelets:

The project needed a name so it will forever be called 'Eyelet Polka', but as I've mentioned before your not going to be starting the stitching yet, I am going to get you picking your colours and your equipment. 

So let's begin with the first part, which is picking your colour palette!

In total you need to pick eight colours, they have to be colours that make you smile/cheer you up (strict order here folks). You won’t be working with all eight colours every tutorial, on average you’ll only work with three colours at any one time. So the colours you pick should ideally compliment one another. You should have a look at Wild Olive for some great colour combinations.

Yummy

I’ve used for my palette, DMC stranded cottons in the following colours: 

• 598
• 955
• 3805
• 725
• 899
• 907
• 926
• 938

Once you have selected your colours, I’d love to see them so why not upload them to my flickr group page - I like to be nosey! Join the Craft Hive.

Now with the pretty things sorted, you need to gather other materials and equipment:

FABRIC: I’ll be using a light weight calico throughout the tutorials, it’s nice to work on and it’s cheap, and an extremely underrated fabric. At times you may need additional fabric but I will indicate with each tutorial what you will need.

TEMPLATES/PATTERNS: Will be downloadable at the start of each stitching tutorial

EQUIPMENT:

• 6” wooden ring frame – I use a table mounted ring frame [like this one] they really are a useful piece of equipment and mean you can work hands free, but by all means use whatever you have to hand.
• Sharp embroidery scissors – if you don’t have any, I really recommend that it’s time you treated yourself to a pair, they really are invaluable. [Recommend Kia scissors]
• Sharp needles
• Stiletto / very thick tapestry needle
• Sharpened HB pencil
• Pins

At this point, I should add if you do use a wooden ring frame, then I would recommend that if you haven’t already do so is to wrap the rings with either cotton tape or strips of calico fabric. Check out my handy dandy tutorial on prepping a ring frame. Click me.

PART 2 - The Stitching
PART 3 - How to finish

Any point you have any questions, please feel free to leave me a comment.