Designing Handicraft Garments from Scratch

Looking for a new technique to stimulate and express your creativity? Embroidery may be just what you’re looking for. Gabriela Martínez is a textile artist with a passion for everything handmade who has turned embroidery into her way of life. She’s the founder of the brand Ofelia & Antelmo, a textile art project focused on hand embroidery with a mission to create unique pieces bursting with texture and color. Gabriela's use of artisanal processes and meticulous techniques have led her work to be exhibited in Mexico, Brazil, Hong Kong, France, and Chile.

In this online course, learn how to embroider a garment woven with your personality following Gabriela Martínez’s creative process from start to finish. Discover her secrets for choosing colors, designing compositions, and achieving stunning visual effects, as well as her favorite stitches.

Start this online course by getting to know Gabriela Martínez, her creative journey in embroidery, and how her project Ofelia & Antelmo sparked her career in wearable textile art. Gabriela also shares her embroidery philosophy and the different ways she applies it before talking about her main influences and visual sources of inspiration, which include artists, compositions, colors, and everyday life itself.

Learn how to choose a color palette with Gabriela's method, mixing and matching base colors until you find the best fit. Explore the collage technique to visualize different ideas, color combinations, and possibilities for your final project design. Then plan the layout of your embroidery piece by seeing how to create organized textures with movement.

Once your final design is ready, find out more about the essential materials you need to bring it to life. Gabriela gives you an in-depth explanation about resistant fabrics for embroidery, specialty scissors, thread, and needles. She also teaches you to shop smart with some practical tips on how much material you really need to translate your design into fabric and thread.

Next, get a brief introduction to embroidery. Gabriela expresses why her textures and type of embroidery convey a sense of meditation and shows you a range of creative possibilities for your pieces. Get some practice in with the rice stitch, the running stitch, and the fan stitch by embroidering three 10 x 10 cm samples.

Continue with basic principles of cutting your pattern correctly. Then, see how you can mark the guides on the fabric to carefully follow your design and leave the seam allowances free from embroidery. Finally, it’s time to embroider your piece! Gabriela shows you how to create the hems and use the embroidery stitch to join all the pieces together and form your finished garment.

Now you know how to design and embroider a textile art garment or piece with unique finishes, textures, and colors.

Create a handmade garment from scratch with the stitch of your choice, ready to frame and display.

Anyone who is curious about hand embroidery and wants to explore their creativity. It’s also great for designers looking to add handcrafted details to their pieces.

Everything is taught from scratch, so no prior knowledge is required.

As for the materials, you need gabardine or cotton canvas, small wooden hoops, thread, embroidery needles, fabric scissors, a fabric ruler, pins, and other easy-to-find items such as standard scissors, glue, and black and white crayons.