Today's tutorial is a little bit more of a How-to. I spotted some gloves in the $1.00 bin at the fabric store, and decided to add embroidery to them. This tutorial will show you how to embroider on stretch knit gloves. I opted for a simple snowflake pattern in white, on red gloves, for some holiday festivity.
Supplies needed for this project:
- A pair of gloves
- Embroidery floss
- A pencil or water soluble pen
- Scissors
Step 1: Determine the placement of your stitches. The body or palm size of my gloves, without being stretched out, was 3-inches by 3-inches. I marked this sizing on a piece of paper, then sketched snowflakes within the space where I would want them on the glove. If you would like to use my snowflake sketches as a guide, you can access them here.
Step 2: Using a pencil or water soluble pen, sketch the snowflake onto your glove. Because the glove is stretchy, there is no real easy way to transfer the pattern, as we won't be placing the glove in a hoop to stitch. If you aren't comfortable with sketching directly onto the glove, Jenny Hart of Sublime Stitching has some awesome tutorials on how to transfer an embroidery pattern to dark fabric or how to transfer an embroidery pattern to stretchy fabrics, in case you want something more stable.
As you can see from the pictures, my finished stitches aren't an exact match to the sketch. I explain this a bit more in step 4.
Step 3: Prepare your floss for stitching. Double or triple knot the end of your floss so that it doesn't slide through the knit once you stretch the glove. Fit your hand into the glove just enough to stretch it slightly. Make sure not to over stretch it, as you don't want the stitches to morph once you take your hand out of the glove.
Step 4: Begin stitching. It is important that you don't pull the floss tightly as you are stitching. Just be gentle and move slowly, making sure to achieve the look you like. I found that using stitches that are a bit longer than I would make when stitching on cotton, worked better with the fabric of the gloves. This is the main reason why my actual stitches aren't the same as the sketch - the longer stitches gave me a larger snowflake. When you need to knot your stitches, turn the glove inside out and double or triple knot the end so it does not move through the knit of the glove.
Step 5: Once you finish one glove, move onto the other.
Step 6: Cover those digits!
Cute! :)
ReplyDeleteThat's a useful tip about the length of stitches thanks, I just bought a pair with the thought of embroidering them. How many strands of floss did you use?
ReplyDeleteI do these and give them out as Christmas gifts. I've found that a way to ensure that your knots don't pull through the fabric of the glove is to use a little square of felt to tie the knot through on the wrong side of the glove. I feed the floss through one little square when I first start embroidering and then knot the floss through one at the end. Your gloves are really cute!
ReplyDeleteHi Dee! I used six strand floss. Hope you enjoy giving this a try!
ReplyDelete