Craft

10 Free Online Embroidery Classes for Beginners

Watch these free embroidery lessons and discover techniques and tips to stitch your ideas into beautiful artwork

Do you have an old jacket that needs a new lease of life? Or maybe you want to make unique decorations for your home? Embroidery is a decorative stitching method suitable for beginners, but with endless options to explore and expand your practice.

These ten classes are free to watch for a limited time, and share how to start embroidery from the very basics. You’ll learn how to plan a design, transfer designs onto fabric, use the embroidery hoop and needle, and create a wide range of stitches for truly unique artwork.

Click the red links to access the free class page, and click the play button on the video player to watch.

Embroidery projects and clothing by Ciara LeRoy (@prettystrange).

These free classes will be available until August 14, 2022. After that date, you can access the classes by signing up to each teacher's full course.

1. Free Class: Using the Hoop and Practicing Stitches

Let’s start with the basics: setting up your workspace. Chloe Giordano (@chloegiordano) specializes in creating artwork inspired by the natural world. She has embroidered book cover designs, illustrated children’s books for publishers including Penguin and Bloomsbury, and has also published a book of her own.

In this class, you’ll learn the basics for getting started with hand-embroidery, including preparing your hoop and how to thread an embroidery needle.

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2. Free Class: Basic Embroidery Stitches

Michelle Staub (@stitchingsabbatical) is a hand-embroidery artist who created a pet portrait business after her first cat portrait received attention online. Since then, her work has led to 180K Instagram followers. In 2021, she published a book, Pet Portrait Embroidery, and she also teaches a Domestika course on the same subject.

In this free class on basic stitches, you’ll get used to working with your hoop, managing tension to ensure a smooth “thread painting” technique.

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3. Free Class: Conceptualizing Your Idea

Now you’ve practiced with your hoop, you might be dreaming of creating an original embroidery piece. For this, you’ll start with a design sketch, which artist Yulia Sherback (@mossandfeather) demonstrates. She combines her passion for needlework, animals, and nature to create jewelry via miniature embroidery.

In this class on creative embroidery design ideas, you can watch Yulia create a mood board for each of the designs that she develops in her course. Using Procreate, she draws a set of sketches that can be adapted into embroidery designs.

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4. Free Class: Color Theory for Embroidery

Nneka Jones (@artyouhungry) is a mixed-media artist who uses her artwork to inspire positive change. Her work has been featured on the cover of TIME Magazine, and she was invited to be a keynote speaker for Adobe Max.

As part of her course on realistic embroidered portraiture, she teaches this class on traditional approaches to basic color theory for embroidery. You’ll learn to identify tints, shades, and gradients in embroidery thread, to build your understanding of how to create depth and portray emotion using yarn.

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5. Free Class: How to Come Up with Designs from Reference

If you want to create embroidery with a sense of place, this class is for you. Embroidery artist Kseniia Guseva, also known as @faimyxstitch, has a passion for architecture—she even created a series of 130 embroidered city patterns.

In her class, you’ll learn about how to design embroidery using a reference, finding new project ideas inspired by memories and travels. Kseniia shares how she chooses a reference image and divides complex architectural shapes into simpler ones.

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6. Free Class: Pattern Making

Ciara LeRoy, a.k.a. Pretty Strange (@prettystrange), is a multidisciplinary artist and designer who specializes in hand lettering and embroidery. She has worked with clients including Facebook, Cosmopolitan, and Pfizer, helping them tell stories through letter-based art.

In this class on pattern-making for clothes, Ciara will take you from a rough sketch to a finished graphical lettering pattern of your own design, ready to be transferred onto a jacket for decoration.

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7. Free Class: Pattern Transfer

Now you’ve got a design you love, it needs to find its way onto your fabric. To teach you a handy pattern transfer technique, we turn in this class to Emillie Ferris (@emillieferris). She’s an expert at the technique known as needlepainting, threadpainting or silk shading: creating realistic effects by using one single strand of thread.

In this class from her course on realistic embroidery techniques, she shares the materials you’ll need to transfer a design from paper to fabric using a pencil.

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8. Free Class: Filler Stitches

Stefanija Pejchinovska is an embroidery artist and designer, also known as Damaja (@damaja). Having opened an Etsy shop and ethical design brand, she has collaborated with a number of sustainable brands and local artists such as Corvera Vargas, Loveco, The Artesao, and more.

Her Domestika course covers hand embroidery for clothing. To cover large areas of a design, you need to follow this class on sewing filler stitches, which block out your color and make designs pop.

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9. Free Class: Embroidering Cursive Letters

Cristin Morgan (@cristinmorgan) is a fiber artist and author of Hoop Dreams: Modern Hand Embroidery. Her work has featured in several publications including The Strategist, Better Homes and Gardens, and Embroidery Magazine.

Here, she teaches her favorite method for how to stitch cursive letters. First, you’ll build on singular lines to add weight and achieve a bolder effect. Cristin also shares how to overlap lines with up and down strokes to add dimension. In her full course, you’ll make an embroidered patch.

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10. Free Class: Creating Texture and Contours

Finally, for embroiderers looking to add more detail to their work, Camille Labarre (@camillelabarre) is the ideal guide. She’s a freelance fabricator specializing in the creation of props, puppets, and sets for animation, film, and theater. She teaches punch needle portraiture here at Domestika.

In this class on textured embroidery techniques, she discusses texture and the different stitches and materials that you can use to achieve a range of effects, such as cross-contour lines for a 3D look.

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These free classes will be available until August 14, 2022. After that date, you can access the classes by signing up to each teacher's full course.

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More embroidery resources to get you started…

1. Watch 14 free tutorials on hand embroidery to continue developing your technique.

2. Follow these 10 embroidery artists on Instagram for constant inspiration.

3. Explore Ciara LeRoy’s course on hand-lettered embroidery to add fun slogans to your clothing.

4. Celebrate nature’s beauty with this freehand needle painting course by Chloe Giordano.

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