How to Embellish a Dress with Cross Stitch

Remember this number from last week? Today I bring you a tutorial on how I did it!

Supplies 

You will need: 

1. A design. I found the one I used for this dress on Flickr. 

2. Embroidery floss. I used the skeins of cotton embroidery floss that have 6 strands, although I only stitched with 3. It looks a bit nicer. 

3. Iron-on transfer paper. You'll be printing out your design onto this paper, so access to a printer is also needed. 

4. Iron-on stabilizer. You'll be poking your fabric 100s of times with a sharp needle, so it helps to keep it from falling apart! I had the cut away kind you leave on permanently at home, so I used that. Learn about the different kinds of stabilizers.

5. A needle. 

6. A hoop. This helps to stabilize the fabric so it doesn't wiggle about while you stitch. 

7. An iron. 

8. Something to stitch on. I sewed Simplicity 1873 for this dress, but these steps would work on a ready-to-wear garment, too. 

Get to Work!

1. Make sure your design is just how you want it to transfer it. 

• Crop it if you're only using part of the design.
• I was wary of transferring large blocks of color that the original design had. So I simplified it to black X's using a tool similar to Microsoft Paint. There might be a fancy application for this, but I just copy/pasted little Xs's.

2. Print out your design on the iron-on transfer paper. Make sure you select "mirror image" in the printer settings or it will be backwards when it's ironed on. 

3. Experiment with where you want to place the design. I stood in front of a mirror and moved around the print outs until I found the spot I wanted. 

4. Next you'll be transferring the design. 

• Test it on a scrap fabric to make sure it's working and looking how you want. 
• Place a towel in the middle of the dress. You don't want to risk transferring bits of ink to the back part of your dress. 
• Place the iron-on transfer of the design onto your fabric and press. 
• Make sure you don't use steam!

 It will look like this when you're done:

5. Apply the stabilizer with your iron where your design is. Since I used permanent, cut-away stabilizer, I placed the stabilizer on the underside of the dress. Here's what the insides of my dress looked like (after stitching) so you can see the stabilizer: 

Now, I would recommend you're a bit more exact with your placement, but it certainly works like this. It was 11 pm the night before I left for Europe, though, so I was in a rush to get this thing prepped for stitching and be off and away! 

6. Stitch! Here's a great tutorial on cross stitch basics. 

Embroidery is such a fun way to add a vintage touch to your garments, don't you think? Happy sewing!