Embroidered Belt Favor

For the embroidery patterns I'd used before I always found a paper colored version of the pattern to be extremely helpful, so that was my first step. I do most of my simple graphic design on my Surface Pro using Powerpoint! It's a surprisingly robust little graphics designer & editor. I drew up my first design elements in Powerpoint, put them together, and after a few hours had my first design ready to print. I colored it in with some colored pencils, and here it is! My first version of the favor.

I used this to come up with color ideas. I needed to get a sense of the number of thread colors I'd need, the specific colors, and how complex I might want to make the final design.

I had previously bought an embroidery starter kit off Amazon so I had a bunch of inexpensive thread on hand to play with (some of which is in one of the gallery pictures below), plus some remnant white cotton. My next step was to practice. This is my first sampler for the project. I hadn't been doing embroidery long enough to know what stitches I wanted to use without testing them. This sampler gave me an opportunity to experiment with options for the stem, and I played around with how I'd fill in the flower petals.

Pilot FriXion pens are a godsend for tracing designs on fabric, and that is what I used here. I wish I had taken a picture before I test-heated the design, because I had notes scribbled all over the sampler in FriXion pen! The notes included things like number of threads for different sections, the number of rows stitched, and colors to try.

Around this time I found a bee design that I loved in a pattern by Jessica Long on Etsy. I bought a copy of her pattern, tweaked the thread colors for my bees, and you can see my first bee here.

I finalized the design with the new bees, and printed it. This sheet started out as the pattern I used to trace the design onto my fabric; I don't have a light box so I tape everything to a window & draw with FriXion pens. It turned into an invaluable set of notes for the final product as I worked on my second sampler. I wrote down what I liked, what I didn't, what I wanted to keep, what to change. I was so glad I had this when the final push to stitch started!

Here's that second sampler I made. This is yet more remnant cotton & some more cheap test threads. I practiced my bees some more & tested additional stem and flower ideas. My plan was to create full mockup of the favor, right down to the final construction, since I had never done anything like this before. I ended up running out of time even though I started in July! This sampler was very helpful for practicing stitches and figuring out what I wanted the final favor to look like.

I included pictures of additional samplers in the gallery, along with an abandoned design idea. I had a particularly hard time getting the flower petal shading right on the sweet peas. Trish Burr is an amazing artist whose sweet pea embroideries I had used as initial references. I came across a fantastic free pattern on her site, and by reading that & watching her tutorials I finally got my sweet pea stitch method dialed in. I was ready to start the final push.

Here is the final design ready to start stitching the favor at last. The grey is a high-quality grey cotton that Gunnolf selected, and I used black remnant cotton and remnant interfacing for the rest of the favor construction. I don't have pictures of it, but the interfacing is on the back of this hoop, enough to go throughout the entire final piece, to make it stronger and a bit stiffer. The different colors of ink are on purpose; I always use different colors of FriXion pen for different elements in a pattern, which makes it super easy to keep track of what is what when stitching.

Here's the finished product! I am really delighted with how well it came out.

I don't have any photos of the construction of the favor, unfortunately. I used Morgan Donner's Belt Favor Tutorial as a construction guide. Along with the embroidered fabric and interfacing, I added the black cotton I mentioned earlier as backing to the piece as shown in the tutorial. The hardest part of the favor construction was getting the fabric with the embroidery centered, measured, and cut out. I definitely messed up when starting to cut the final length with the belt loop taken into account, but that part ended up on the back side of the belt loop & I just stitched the small cut I made closed. It's all hand-sewn, because I didn't have a sewing machine at the time.

For the belt loop I eyeballed it with a belt that I had on hand, and used a simple herringbone stitch & black thread to close the loop (with reinforcement stitches on the sides).