Get Your Stitch on with These Beginner-Friendly Embroidery Kits
Ever since Emma Downing of Yarn Industries took us into the magical world of embroidery – you can find four exclusive Peppermint embroidery patterns in Issue 51 or in Sew&Tell Issue 1 – we here at Peppermint have been OBSESSED with getting our stitch on.
Hand embroidery can be a meditative practice that creates complex and beautiful artworks in fabric form. It can also give you all the fun of drawing on your clothes when you were a kid, while being adult appropriate, kind of posh, and lasting through a good laundry cycle. It’s a great way to add individualism and style to your wardrobe or spruce up an old piece that no longer sparks joy.
If you want to dip your toe into the waters of embroidering, a great place to start is with a ready-made kit. An embroidery kit provides all basic tools you’ll need to get started (a hoop, needles, thread, fabric to embroider) in one fell swoop, as well as a gorgeous design to banish those blank page (or fabric) blues, plus all of the instructions you need to ensure your work of art turns out looking as beautiful as the one on the box. Kits can help build your confidence and proficiency until you feel ready to go rogue one day, freehand style, embroidering everything in sight.
To that end, we’ve found five beginner-appropriate and super cute embroidery kits to help you take your first steps on the not-so-long and arduous journey of becoming a master of the craft!
Yarn Industries
Our personal embroidery guide Emma from Yarn Industries actually offers a beginners’ embroidery kit, a deluxe box that contains everything you need to learn the craft of embroidery and create a gorgeous piece of Australiana hoop art (you can choose between Gum Leaf, Banksia, Wattle or Parakeet designs). Each kit contains a ‘Beginners Guide to Embroidery’ booklet that has step-by-step instructions for all the stitches you need to know and tips and tricks to guide you on future projects. The kit even includes test fabric for you to practise your stitches on – now that’s forward thinking!
Hook, Line & Tinker
Hook, Line & Tinker was launched by Laurie Dolhan in 2017, providing embroidery patterns and kits based on Laurie’s original illustrations. Her patterns are striking yet simple, perfect for a novice needler with limited colour palettes and basic introductory stitches. Her collections are sorted by recurring motifs and themes and come in three levels of increasing difficulty. Our favourites are the nautical designs like this Deep Dive kit, a first-time-friendly kit inspired by Moby Dick’s majestic whales.
Tusk and Twine
Self-taught embroidery artist Kate Beardmore created Tusk and Twine as a passion project to combine her love of textiles and hand stitching and her background in graphic design. Her work is lush as all get out, with crisp line art and colourful bursts of botanical detail. This Grow Wild embroidery kit creates a gorgeous five-inch work of art and comes with all the supplies you’ll need, as well as all important information on materials, transferring your pattern, preparing your hoop and starting to stitch.
RikRack
RikRack’s founder Riki Inge has a masters degree in textile design with specialisation in embroidery and dyeing. Those skills combine in her embroidery kits, where the intricate yet deceptively easy designs come pre-printed on the fabric, saving you the hassle of pattern transferring all those sumptuous little flourishes. This bee-utiful kit is appropriate for “beginners and beyond” and not only comes with instructions but has its own page on rikrack.com full of tips, tricks and troubleshooting!
Brynn and Co
How could we here at ‘Have Hope’ Headquarters resist Brynn & Co’s brilliant, botanical, negative-space, positive-slogan pieces? Despite the overall dazzling effect, the design utilises only a handful of common embroidery stitches and includes a visual, step-by-step guide to the creation process. This kit comes with fabric pre-printed with the design as well as a paper copy of the pattern so once you get your hand in you can sew it again and again and again, on anything your heart desires!
