How to Embroider Your Sweater (Easy & Fun Upcycle Trick)

Hi there and a warm welcome to the Charles and Eileen YouTube channel. I'm Eileen and I'm so excited about this new YouTube venture. When Charles told me about it I was like okay how are we gonna make this happen and he just started it off. Last week was amazing. If you didn't check out his tutorial yet on how he embroiders his Van Gogh inspired disguise you have to check out the last video or technically the first video of this and then he asked me that I'm up next. So here I am and I was thinking of what do I want to present first and actually I'm going to show you how I embroidered this and I know that many of you are excited about that because when I posted this on my Instagram I got just wonderful support which makes me genuinely really excited because I'm so happy and just excited I just said that but I'm really excited about embroidering on my clothes for many reasons. First it's very good for my wallet because it's like I can renew my wardrobe whenever I want to without having to buy new clothes but also what's even better is that it's great for the environment and I don't have to feel that I'm part of the consumerist of buying new all the time but with simple measures I can choose the colors I want, I can choose the textures, the kind of techniques I want, just basically do anything I want and lastly just walking in something that you've made yourself. I mean I just the feeling is literally just like your shoulders get straightened and you just I made this made this it's it's really really incredible and that's also why I embroidered on my wedding dress for example because to just really feel that you are part in the process of just making your outfit really you and this is also why we have a full online course on embroidery on clothes over on the Charlton Elm Academy you find all the links for that below as well I'm not going to go too much into it but we have a full module with embroidery on knitting there as well but today is just literally showing this as an inspiration example so that you can maybe do it yourself as well. Why I chose to do what is a bit more special with this sweater is really the monochromatic look of it because I've seen so much inspo pictures and knitting hashtags on Instagram and Pinterest and so where it's a lot of same color yarn or you even use actually the same yarn if you have knitted the sweater yourself just get an extra yarn ball if you say like that English yarn ball sounds funny and you use that for embroidery because in this way you have the same material which makes it a nice homogeneity in it and it's just that little detail that just makes it look really exclusive even if it's pretty simple to do let's just dive into it all right we are ready to get started now for this project it's actually perfect because it's very few materials you only need a needle and here I'm using a tapestry needle so it's a bit bigger than the usual embroidery needle that we use for our fine art embroideries that we talk more about in the Charlestown Academy but here we have a tapestry needle I like to keep them on these small cutout pieces because it allows you to really keep track of your different needles and the different sizes and then we also have a yarn ball so this is the same merino wool yarn that my mother used to knit this sweater so now I had the chance of her having an extra piece of this yarn so that I can use exactly the same but if you happen to have a bought sweater bring the sweater to the yarn shop and try to look out the one that is the closest and lastly we need a scissor we are going to embroider one of these flowers right here and I chose to do this kind of design because for this pattern of the knitted sweater it's a raglan I think you'd say in English and that means that when you are adding the knits you get these small parts where you can see where it's been added so I thought that to just cover those up with flowers would make it perfect so that's what we're going to do and that's sort of how this design got inspired actually just a way to cover that up nicely and smoothly without making it pop too much we are going to take a bit longer thread than what you usually do I would say about 60 centimeters for all of the Europeans and the rest I recommend to look that up or we can put it in the description below take out the needle I'm gonna thread the needle I do that by taking the yarn in my left hand cut it in half you see it here and push through and this is very good when you're using wool to embroider because it's not so nice to lick it if we can say like that Charles actually made a super funny video about this on his Instagram so I hope he can link to that in this video as well because it's really worth seeing all right so let's get started you start by putting the needle from behind so I'm going to open a little bit here and put the needle in the center of where I want it placed so I'm imagining now that my flower is going to be centered right where I put up the needle so it's a little bit to the right from the one above all right and pull now I'm leaving about how much can this be about 20 centimeters because that is what we're going to use when we attach the thread on the back afterwards we go to work with satin stitches now satin stitches or overlapping satin stitches it essentially means that you do one stitch next to each other you see just like they are here like the same length of stitch and next to each other so I'm going to start just by doing in one of the directions and I do a full loop pull it back now here you have to be really careful to not pull too hard because you don't want the sweater to pull together to be bubbly and thereby it's very easy to just put it down in a relaxed sort of mode or position and there you can see so that you haven't pulled it too hard are the knits row or the knitted rows are they pulling together or are they just relaxed I'm going to start by just doing the basic so I'm doing five you can see here before I start layering on top because in this way it's easier if I want to redo any of it I don't have to redo too many of the petals at once every time I start from the middle and I make a stitch outwards in the length that I want the petal to be and come back to the middle again all the time very very careful of how hard I pull here you can see I'm overlapping a little bit of that flower like that should be this way or this way I will put it this way okay so I have now the basic outlining of the petals now it's just a matter of building up the petals and building the volume by overlaying and aligning the similar stitches and as here is a little bit bigger gap I can choose to align my stitches on that side so thereby making them gradually get a little bit closer so the gap isn't as big all the time checking so that you don't pull too hard so right another tip to check so that you don't pull too hard is to put your thumb on top of the thread as you pull because then you your left thumb in this case as I'm right-handed helps you to stabilize the threads be sure to not double the thread I'm making one last petal before I'm going to attach this thread and if you notice that you pull slightly too hard like I did here simply take the needle put it under all of the threads of the petal and pull lightly outwards you see okay I now have the thread here in the middle we are going to attach our first thread still keep it in the middle but just a few millimeters to the side so not through the same hole because then you will undo your previous stitch but you still want it centered so just do a slight small stitch to the side when that's finished it will look roughly like this you see so I have a small stitch on the side it also makes a nice detail of centering the petals okay you come up on the other side just double check so that you didn't pull too hard pull out the petals a little bit okay you can see the small stitch here that came in the middle all right now by just pure speed I pulled out my thread but that's fine so as we started the embroidery in the middle you now have one end of the thread as well as the other end of the thread do a double knot two and pull hard we're actually going to do a third one just because it looks so cool all right and that is enough for attaching the thread so when you are embroidering on knitting it's advised to use knots because you want to avoid that the embroidery undo itself when you put it in the washing machine so if you are washing a wool sweater or a knitted sweater in general you should always wash it in a washing bag and preferably alone in the delicate program but either way even if you do it in the delicate program or even if you would do it by hand by attaching with knots you ensure that also the knitted rows don't sort of change or that it all gets tangled up together after you do that always cut off the threads before you start a new thread because otherwise you can also create a big like just bubble and mess of threads on the backsides always try to complete each thread as you go before you start the next one and this is the same for any other embroidery design as well so i don't think that this one is completely finished so i'm going to take a second thread and do the same process and finish it up you can layer as many stitches on top of each other as you like you can see this one is a bit more volume so essentially the more stitches you do on each petal the more volume you will create that is really what you're working with when you have the same kind of color because let's say we would do this flower in different colors where maybe it's a bit darker in the bottom a bit lighter on top here then the number of stitches on top of each other and the layers has a completely different reason or effect whereas here it's really working on the 3d or the volume don't forget to leave attaching the last thread just something that i should have mentioned maybe the last time is that the first knot that you're making that one shouldn't be too hard that one is just until you feel a little bit of resistance and thereafter you're able to pull it hard again without it pulling the threads or the stitches on the front all right we are now done you see here i created quite some extra volume on the petals i have done all the ones that i want to have and here i have done all of the flowers sort of in the same size now another thing apart from color that you can think about to just vary and to create your own personal style is to make a few of them smaller and maybe some of them much bigger that's really really up to you and your experimentation wow you made it to the end like you're awesome so exciting and i really hope that this video was valuable for you and if it was don't forget to give us a thumbs up i suppose you should say on youtube and subscribe to the channel because we've got plenty of videos lined up for you not just tutorials in this way but i believe that next if it's next week or when it will come but the next video is with charles and i together which will be the first of its kind because most of our courses one have to take care of the camera etc so it's going to be pretty exciting i believe so don't forget subscribe and give us a thumbs up share it um follow us on instagram and just join the embroidery movement together with us