Paper, Embroidered

I was in charge of making up a little thank you card for a guest speaker who came to one of my club's meetings. I thought I'd try a little paper embroidery...this was not a particularly good idea. For many reasons, this was much harder than expected and came out not as pretty as I'd have liked. See my faux "calligraphy" on the envelope there?


Here's how I did it:
-Pushpin to make holes since I was using a blunt-tipped needle

-Weight 4 worsted yarn, stripped down to one strand (in lieu of embroidery floss)

-Chain stitches (I believe they are called) for the loopy petals on the flowers, everything else was straight stitch.

-Dafont.com for a calligraphy-looking font to semi-copy onto the envelope. I'm fancy like that.

Here's why it almost didn't work:

-Paper tears. The small pushpin holes were made bigger by the needle and yarn going through, so the holes were quite visible. Not especially pretty.

-The yarn was finicky. I mean that from pulling the yarn repeatedly through the cardstock-weight paper, it started to pull apart itself so that it was essentially unraveling itself. It's like when you pull putty and it gets really long and skinny in the middle then breaks? Yeah, like that.

-It was a card so of course there was going to be writing on the inside. But the inside was also the ugly backside of the yarn embroidery. Solution? Some pink construction paper glued down over it to hide the backside. Why didn't it work? The yarn was so lumpy in places (from loose ends and whatnot), the paper wouldn't glue down flat. Of course, when your paper isn't flat, glue sticks refuse to stick anything together. So, the inside was unflatteringly taped down with Scotch tape.


All in all, a good product. I probably wouldn't do it again unless I was embroidering with actual floss and on cloth.