Embroidery on Knit Fabrics

Avec ses petits doigts

June 21

Embroidery machines allow you to personalized your own clothes. It's really rewarding to take a store bought item and make it your own. While embroidering on knit fabric isn't really different than on woven fabric, you need to follow a few steps to make sure your embroidery looks good.

For Mother's Day this year, I decided to customize one of my very plain sweatshirts to make it a little more fancy. Once I decided on the design I wanted, its size and its placement, I fused a piece of Knit-N-Stable interfacing on the inside of my sweatshirt where my design will be stitched. This step allows the design to be well supported without compromising the stretch of the fabric.

I marked the placement of my design on the right side of my sweatshirt with a pen which lines will disappear once pressed. Always do a test sample first when marking your fabric.

I hooped some medium weight tear away stabilizer, making sure it was tight and secure, but I didn't want to hoop my fabric. To save some time and to avoid the crease marks from the hoop on the fabric, I decided to "float" my sweatshirt instead.

Using the marks on my fabric, I floated the sweatshirt on the stabilizer and secured with pins all around making sure it was centered and tight. This is also a great time to use the Baste function built in to so many of our Janome embroidery machines, as described in this previous Janome Life blog.

With my Janome Skyline S9, I was able to use my iPad and the free Janome AcuEdit app to send the design directly to the machine.

Janome AcuEdit App is free for iPads and Android tablets

Following the directions and the threads colour changes, I finished stitching the design in less than 1 hour.

Once it was all done, I removed the hoop and trimmed the tear away stabilizer. With my iron, I removed the pen marks and my sweatshirt was ready to wear!

Using the combination of medium weight tear away stabilizer and the fusible knit-n-stable interfacing was key to success. Using the correct stabilizer makes all the different! My sweatshirt has no puckering and didn't loose any of its stretch. Find out more about stabilizers in these previous Janome Life blogs.