How to Wash and Care for Your Embroidery

Yolanda Andrés shares her tips on caring for your embroidered items so they will last.

Yolanda Andrés (@yolandandres) grew up surrounded by needle and thread and, although at first she went into graphic design and painting, she eventually became an accomplished textile artist and embroiderer. Over more than a decade, she found a way to escape and relax through traditional embroidery. Armed with cotton thread, fabric and glass beads, Yolanda can turn stitches into a collector’s item.

Yet, it’s not only about the stitching. You must also know how to look after your embroidered pieces further down the line, how to wash and care for them.

- Always wash and iron the piece on the reverse

To best preserve an embroidered item, it is paramount to not ‘mistreat’ the thread. Yolanda recommends working on the reverse side of the embroidery if we need to rub or iron it. This is the area where all the threads start, finish and are joined together.

- Always wash by hand in cold water and use a soap bar

In some instances, the color of the thread can fade or bleed into the fabric or the other threads. The fabric can also shrink or damage if we wash it with other garments. For this reason, Yolanda recommends washing pieces by hand, separately and with cold water, to avoid the color spoiling and the fabric shrinking.
If you liked this tutorial, do not miss more tips from Yolanda in her course ‘Embroidery Techniques: Illustrating with Needle and Thread’ where you will learn to transfer a drawing to fabric and prepare a base to practice all types of stitching with your needle and thread.

In this video, she shares the key to ensuring your pieces remain perfect:

You may be interested in:

- Floral Composition with Acrylic Paint and Embroidery, a course by Josefina Jiménez.
- Advanced Embroidery Techniques: Stitches and Composition with Volume, a course by Señorita Lylo.
- Creating Embroidered Portraits, a course by Bugambilo.