Embroidery Tutorial: How to Finish Your Design

Learn these tricks to give your embroidery a professional finish, as well as tips to protect your designs in the long-term

You can tell dozens of amazing stories with something as humble as a needle and thread. Embroidery allows you to transfer your passions, thoughts, and images onto a hoop that will gradually take shape.

You may have learned the basic stitches and composed your design, but one of the most important steps lies in finishing your embroidery. How can you finish off your work so that it doesn’t come undone?

Loly Ghirardi goes by the monika Señorita Lylo (@srtalylo). She’s a professional graphic designer and embroiderer who creates unique designs using a needle and thread. In this tutorial, she gives you a few tips on finishing off your embroidery to prolong its lifespan and ensure it doesn’t spoil. Watch the video below:

4 tips on giving your embroidery a finishing touch and preserving your designs

1. Finish your embroidery

With your needle still threaded, stitch through a little piece of fabric, fiber or another stitch then push the needle through the loop left by the thread and pull.

This will finish off the section you’re working on, so that it doesn’t come undone. You can also stitch over other stitches to finish the thread. Repeat the process twice to ensure it’s fixed firmly in place.

If you can’t finish off with a needle, you can also tease open the strands of your thread and tie them into a knot.

2. Add an adhesive backing

To preserve the back of your embroidery and ensure none of your knots come undone, Señorita Lylo recommends using an adhesive backing. You can buy this fabric from a haberdashery, it comes in various shades and thicknesses. It has glue on one side, which is the one you need to stick onto the embroidery. Now get your iron and gently iron over the backing to fix it in place.

3. Rub out any traces of pen

Use a pen that can be rubbed out with heat to make your drawing, so you can erase it gently with the iron or a hair dryer.

4. Gently wash your embroidery

There are a few things you need to remember if you want to wash your design. First don’t use a washing machine, it’s much better to hand wash or to take your design to the dry cleaners. If you are washing by hand, simply place your embroidery gently into a bowl of water with a little soap for a short while. Do not rub.

Did you like this tutorial? If you want to learn the stitches that will give your designs a new dimension, and incredible combed styles, don’t miss Señorita Lylo’s online tutorial: Advanced Embroidery Techniques: Stitches and Compositions with Volume.

You may also like:
- Basic Embroidery Techniques: Stitches, Compositions and Color Ranges, with Señorita Lylo.
- Introduction to Botanical Embroidery, a course by Coricrafts.