Swim Along With Me: Embroidered Dress

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In May or April 2025, I set out to make an embroidered dress. I drew two design options for the Beaton Studio River Dress.

I used to embroider a lot more. It was, in fact, the first textile art I was really into. Never anything complicated, but I made little baubles and embroidered probably 30 hats. I still wear this dandelion hat today, along with the first one I ever made (and don’t have a photo of).

But, in the past few years, embroidery has been back in my life in a big way because I acquire and edit embroidery instructional books. I have worked with a lot of fantastic embroidery artists, but I’d like to particularly call out Megan Zaniewski, with whom I’ve been collaborating on books over many years at this point. I have learned so much from working with her, and I even am lucky enough to own two special little pieces.

Part of being a craft book editor is the pull to do all the new things you are reading and writing and editing, until, eventually, you are sitting down with a needle and thread. All of which is to say, I had been thinking about embroidery a lot and wanting to take on a bigger project with my newfound skills.

(I also really love the work of Tessa Perlow. She makes gorgeously embroidered garments that are knockout inspiring every time!)

I sketched two designs, but eventually decided to go with a scene of New York spring wildflowers: Pink Lady slippers bowing over trillium, dandelions, and violets.

I drew the design on paper in the shape of the dress bodice, then transferred it to wash-away stabilizer paper. This paper sticks to the fabric, then dissolves in water when the project is finished. I cut the dress pattern from the fabric—a mistake! I definitely should have been embroidering on a larger piece of fabric to then cut the pattern piece from later, but luckily, this didn’t come back to bite me too bad. The fabric is Emerald Washed Linen from Blackbird Fabrics.

While the stabilizer is sticky, I soon found that the adhesive was not strong enough for such a big project where I would need to move the hoop around a lot. So, I basted the stabilizer to the fabric with my sewing machine (the white lines of stitching). For all the hand embroidery, I’m using DMC six-stranded floss (and using all six strands).

That spring of 2025, I stitched one Lady Slipper and a few of the violets, and then it hit me that I had taken on a really massive project. It was going slowly, I struggled to work on it at night (which is when I normally do handwork like knitting) because I needed to make sure I was choosing the right colors, and I missed knitting. So, I set it aside. I never leave WIPs forever, but I knew I needed a break from this one. I had also started to have doubts that I had chosen the right dress pattern, so that also slowed down my desire to work on this.

Then, this May, about a whole year later, I picked it back up. I was ready to finish it. Embroidery is one of the few arts I do where the project is pretty while you’re working on it. Usually there is a lot of trusting the process and hoping things will turn out in the end. But, I liked the stitching itself from the very beginning, and while I had doubts about how it would translate to the finished garment, I felt confident in the floral design.

Some tips & tricks for embroidery from this novice:

• I already mentioned this once, but definitely embroider on a larger piece of fabric than the finished piece needs to be when possible! The pattern piece did stretch and fray in some across the stitching process. It also faded a little bit, and had to be washed to remove the stabilizer. You want that wiggle room!

• You probably need stabilizer for stitching on a garment! This linen would have been way too loosely woven, and I would have had major problems if I hadn’t already been using a stabilizer. It’s also a convenient way to transfer a hand-drawn design.

• That being said, beware the stabilizer adhesive. Long straight stitches to secure the stabilizer to the fabric were required, and they were pretty easy to remove later with a seam ripper, even when I had embroidered over them.

• I used all six strands of the embroidery floss. I like the chunky look, and of course, it makes things go faster. I find that embroidery is easy to stylize—choose the colors you want, improvise, and stitch in a way that you like as you go.

• You also don’t need to learn a lot of embroidery stitches. Many of the “stitches” employed here are just straight stitches in different formations. For example, you could say that this piece uses brick stitch, long and short stitch, stem stitches, and seed stitches. But, all of those are just straight stitches in different formations (offset, blended together, overlapping, scattered). If you can make a straight stitch, you can achieve a lot of different textures and shapes.

• The most important part of this piece was stitch direction! Pay close attention to how you want your stitches to flow, where they should diverge from one another, overlap, etc. That’s what mattered the most to make a floral look how I wanted it to.

So I finished it!

It probably took about 5-6 months of stitching regularly (4-5 times a week) total to eventually get this done about 14 months after I started it. I dissolved the stabilizer and unpicked the basting stitches.

I knew there would be creases and wrinkles in the fabric. It was, as I mentioned, not the best choice for complicated embroidery, and I could have done a better job applying the interfacing to perfectly flat and taut fabric at the beginning. But, once I sewed everything together, I stopped noticing.

I was definitely still holding some doubts about the dress pattern, but once I finally got to try it on for the first time, that all melted away.

I added 2’’ to the length of the skirt and sewed a size Small with no other mods. It is a dreamy little dress.

Worth it? Yes. Beautiful enough that I immediately started thinking about embroidering another garment? Yes.

Would I have fun doing that? No. So, should I actually do that any time soon? No, no I should not. 😉

Thanks for swimming along with me!

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