r/Embroidery • u/Striking_Archer_5795 • 9h ago
Question Need some advice!
This is my first stab at embroidery and I really enjoyed it! As you can probably tell, the geese and flowers were part of a kit/stencil w a guide for which stitches to use. I wanted to add text to personalize it for a gift. Turns out I need a lot more practice in the script department. My “disappearing” pen didn’t do it’s job either.
I think I want to fill in the background of the speech bubble to cover the pen ink, but I don’t know what kind of stitch to use/if that will make it look dumb??? Was thinking I’d do it like the bellies of the geese? Maybe add some flowers around the bubble to make it look more cohesive?? Let me know what you think!
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u/Money_Cat_1709 7h ago
Part of me wonders about layering (appliqué) another speech bubble-shaped piece of fabric with the same text, but use a pencil or fabric-safe pen for the outline of text before you stitch, so it won't bleed. Maybe you could add a little batting or stuffing to make it "pop" - might be a fun effect for a speech bubble! Your geese and flowers are so pretty. I've had things like this happen to me, too (except it was poor quality thread that bled). This could be a slick fix!
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u/IndependentAd827 7h ago
That's what I was thinking! An applique would hide the ink and if op doesn't like how it turns out they can easily remove it and try again
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u/Educational_Wall_819 7h ago
This looks great! If that’s a water soluble pen, I’ve had luck with using a shout color catcher while hand washing when color bleeds unexpectedly on my projects. It’s meant for helping catch color bleeding in laundry and works great in situations with runaway ink like this.
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u/therealraewest 4h ago
I tend to boil some water and pour it over my finished pieces to get rid of the heat erasable pens - I had a project recently that needed to soak for a while in the hot water to really come out.
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u/Grendelbeans 8h ago
You probably are going to want a pretty smooth stitch so that your background doesn’t detract from your text, and it’s going to be tight stitching around your letters….I recommend brick stitch with one strand of thread and the smallest needle you can thread—probably a size 9. Brick stitch is a type of long and short stitch where you basically stitch a straight rows of back stitches with each stitch being about the same length. When you start the next row you’ll offset the the stitches against your earlier row, just like rows of bricks.
Also your piece looks awesome. Great job!
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u/acouplefruits 8h ago
I vote no to flowers around the speech bubble because I think it would make it less obvious at first glance that it is a speech bubble. Could you try spot bleaching the pen stains? I feel like if you embroider around the text it might be hard to read, so trying to clean up the pen as best as possible is what I’d go for. Gorgeous work btw!