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Use Your Sewing Machine for Easy Embroidery on Any Garment

Kelly Bryden

Kelly Bryden, an east coast native, is stoked to be a part of the Brit + Co team. Design, DIY, and fashion are her passions. If she isn't crafting you can catch her on the dance floor or wrapped up in aerial silks.

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Jul 05, 2016

Use Your Sewing Machine for Easy Embroidery on Any Garment

It’s no lie that everyone here at Brit HQ has fallen in love with embroidery. (For example, check out Maddie’s tutorial on how to turn embroidery into a patch!) I personally love it and hate it for the same reason — it takes so dang long! Sometimes this is to your advantage, like when you are stuck on a long flight or have a couple hours to kill in the car. On the other hand, sometimes you just want quirky embroidery on a jacket but don’t have 10 hours to dedicate to the craft. Enter the ultimate embroidery hack. Plug in your sewing machine and use the various stitches to create embroidered art. You and your friends will be amazed by the results!

Materials + Tools:

– jean or cargo jacket

– stencils

– chalk

– thread in various colors

– sewing machine

Instructions:

1. Use chalk to draw or stencil your desired pattern onto your jacket.

2. Choose a funky stitch setting on your sewing machine and follow the chalk lines to embroider your design onto your jacket.

I hope that my decision to embroider a pineapple on the back of a jean jacket doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone :) Choose your own favorite design and use chalk to draw it onto the back of your jacket.

Worried about your drawing skills? We understand. Use stencils to letter your favorite phrase.

This DIY hack is all about the sewing machine. Most sewing machines come with a few different stitches that you can play around with to create decorative patterns. Above I highlighted the two stitches I used on these jackets. One was a box-like stitch and the other was just a basic stitch that I sewed in place three times to create a darker line.

Choose your stitch and start following the lines you created with chalk. Remember: Slow and steady wins the race.

Not only can you change up the stitches, but you can also change the thread color! It was so fun to think of the sewing machine as a source of creating art rather than a tool to bind two things together.

Pineapples forever and always please :)

Last week I went to the SF Moma and spotted a girl wearing a jacket that said “Kate Moss and Some Pizza Slices.” As a true mid-twenty-year-old woman, I tried following her until I could get a good enough picture of her jacket for Snapchat ;) Later on, my friends and I went to dinner and noticed the girl was sitting at the table right in front of us! We complimented her on her jacket and she told us that she was an artist from Italy and she DIYed the jacket herself. We loved her story and I was inspired to pick two of my favorite things and embroider them onto the back of this jacket.

Tori stepped in to help me model my newly embroidered jackets and didn’t give me any problems when I asked her to wear the sunglasses on the back of her head.

The jacket and sunglasses are both from H&M and together only cost about $40. $30 for the jacket and $8 for the glasses — we love heading to H&M, Forever 21, Old Navy, etc. to buy the latest trends to test out our newest DIY projects and ideas.