The Write Stuff Challenge - Week 7 - Embroidery Patterns

 

 

Welcome back for week 7 of our Cricut Drawing Challenge!
This week we are focusing on Embroidery Patterns.

 

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This week I am branching out a little and showing you how you can use your Cricut as a starting point for a completely different type of crafting. (I feel like I need to put a bit of a disclaimer on this post because I am by no means an expert in embroidery, and this post is not meant to cover stitching skills or techniques. I would, however, like to encourage you to try something new!)

When the Cricut Maker was released, they also released a blue Washable Fabric Pen. This pen is really useful for marking fabric that you are going to use in a sewing pattern, but you can also use it in your explore machine to draw on any fabric! 

 Using your Cricut to draw on fabric is easy and you don't need a Maker to use the Washable Fabric Pen. The project that I am sharing with you today doesn't involve any cutting, so you can use any Cricut Design Space compatible machine for this technique.

You can find the canvas I created for this week's project here*: Floral Hand Embroidery Pattern

For this project, I used the Washable Fabric Pen  to draw on the back side of my material (cotton canvas). If you also choose to work on the wrong side of your fabric, don't forget to mirror your design (especially if you are working with text!). I recommend drawing on the "wrong" side because, although the pen is washable, it is not water soluble (water soluble pens have a special kind of ink that can be wiped or dabbed away with a damp sponge) and I didn't want to wash this particular project. You will actually need to wash your fabric if you want to get the Cricut pen out.

One thing that worked really well for me was using my Cricut Brightpad (on the lowest brightness setting) underneath my embroidery ring. The light shining through the fabric illuminated the pattern so I could easily place my stitches without needing to turn my work over.

Here is a fun fun picture of the mess on the backside of my canvas 😁
You can see the blue outline of the design.

Finding a Design Space image to work with is really easy. I just searched for "flower" in the images available to me with my Cricut Access Premium  subscription. One layer images work just fine for this type of project because you can typically still tell where the boundaries would be for different parts of whichever flower you choose to work with.

I sized my image to fit within a 10" hoop, but you could size your image for any hoop size you are working with. I found it useful to include a circle around my image that matched my hoop size so I could easily center my design with the hoop.

That's all you really need to know to get started on this project! I hope that I have sparked your imagination a little.  Be sure to come back next week for the final project theme & thanks so much for stopping by! Don't forget to join me on Facebook and share the wonderful projects that you have created.