Early in my art-to-wear career, my lavish hand embroideries caught the eye of rock musician Christine McVie, who commissioned a pair of heavily embellished jeans to wear on Fleetwood Mac’s concert tour. Pieces like that had to be spectacular to stand out on the concert stage. And the truth is, I’ve always liked a maximalist, totally original, version of embroidery. However, those one-of-a-kind projects were time-consuming.

A couple of decades later, I began to take advantage of machine technology to speed up the process. I started out by machine embroidering one or more motifs, and then, with this as my base, I let my imagination—and my hands—fly. If you’re not confident about your drawing or hand-embroidery skills, the base design provides an easy-to-follow guide. The effects you can achieve this way range from cheery and folkloric to dazzling couture-style embroidery.

Since I’m temperamentally incapable of repeating myself when I design, enhancing digitized motifs with hand embellishment is a natural way to expand the potential of machine embroidery. I consider any part of the motif or its background fair game. If you love dimensional embroidery with texture and sparkle, or want to customize a motif to fit a specific project, consider giving your machine-embroidered designs that special, hands-on touch.

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Start at the Machine

Machine and hand embroidery require different types of control. Stitch on unadorned fabric and, if you’re making the garment, embroider each section before construction.

Keep designs light

While the digitized motifs you choose can represent anything you like, I recommend using designs that have light or primarily satin stitch fill. Embroidering by hand through a densely stitched design is laborious and results in a stiff, heavy area. Outlined designs or those that are sparsely digitized offer wonderful opportunities for filling empty spaces with sequins, beads, or textural hand-stitching.

Densely digitized designs can be edited on some machines or with additional software. Lowering the stitch count, altering the fill type, or enlarging the design without increasing the stitch count are all approaches to customizing a design for easier embroidery by hand.

Stabilize, hoop, stitch

Because hand-embellished machine embroidery can be rather heavy, it often requires more support than machine embroidery alone. For this reason, if the fabric is at all unstable or lightweight, I recommend ironing a layer of fusible tricot interfacing to the wrong side of the embroidery area before machine-stitching. This provides permanent support, which is desirable if you choose a removable stabilizer.

Apply a stabilizer suitable for the fabric, and hoop the fabric. If the fabric is delicate, you may prefer to use an adhesive stabilizer rather than clamping the fabric between the inner and outer hoop. Then, let the  machine stitch away. After embroidering, unhoop the fabric and remove the stabilizer.

Tip: Always test first. If you have scrap fabric, stabilize it as you plan to do for the final garment, and stitch out a test motif. If you’re embellishing an existing garment, look for a fabric that is similar to the garment and test on that.

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Then Stitch by Hand

Now is the time to engage your creativity. First, unhoop the fabric and gently remove the stabilizer.

Rehoop the fabric

You’ll now need to hoop the fabric again, this time in a hand-embroidery hoop, to support the area for hand-stitching. Choose a hoop size that can accommodate the entire area you plan to embellish, if at all possible, to avoid rehooping and possibly crushing portions of your handwork.

Plan ahead or improvise

For me, half the fun of any project is collecting materials that inspire me. To embellish embroidery, I gather a wide assortment of threads, beads, sequins, buttons, trims, and ribbons, and start experimenting.

Old crazy quilts and vintage embroidery are a great source of inspiration, but you can find ideas in flora, fauna, or decorative arts such as jewelry, woodcarving, or ceramics.

Although I usually start each embellishment project with a general idea of the effect I want to achieve, I always stray from my initial plan. One of the benefits of hand-sewn embellishments is that, in most cases, they’re not especially difficult to remove.

If you’re not thrilled with something you’ve done, take it out and try again. Approach the embellishment with a spirit of creativity, and turn your machine embroidery into a masterpiece.

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Adapted from “Machine Embroidery: Add Hand Embellishment to Digitized Designs,” by Kayla Kennington, Threads #109, Oct./Nov. 2005.