Problems & Fixes

Thread tangling in embroidery is the craft equivalent of headphone cords in a pocket: you set the thread down straight, you pick it up as a sailor’s knot. I have spent cumulative days of my life untangling floss, and I say that as someone who tracks her stitching hours. The good news is that tangling … Read more

If uneven tension embroidery sessions have left you with lines that wave, stitches that sink, and a back that looks like a plate of spaghetti, you are dealing with the most common technical problem in hand embroidery and also the most fixable. Tension is invisible while you stitch. You cannot see it the way you … Read more

My French knots used to fall apart if I looked at them wrong. I would finish one, admire it for three seconds, and watch it dissolve into a sad little tangle the moment I pulled the needle through. I developed a theory that French knots were a prank the embroidery establishment played on beginners. Then … Read more

I once stitched an entire monogram in DMC 321 when the pattern called for DMC 320. Three hours of satin stitch, in the wrong red. A slightly brighter, slightly wronger red that I noticed the moment I stepped back. I considered keeping it. I considered burning it. Then I spent the next evening learning to … Read more

My first satin-stitch flower looked like a rosette on a Victorian curtain. The petals were fine. The linen around them had gathered into little ripples, as if the fabric were trying to escape the stitching. I spent twenty minutes staring at it, then an hour trying to fix puckered embroidery damage I did not understand. … Read more

You finish the last stitch, unhoop your fabric, lay it flat, and there it is: the fabric around your beautiful design is rippled and gathered, like a little sea of wrIf you’ve ever unhooped your work to find embroidery fabric puckering around your stitches, yIf you’ve ever unhooped your work to find embroidery fabric puckering … Read more